[buug] NetBSD 1.5.2, SS5/10/20 and RAID

[f.johan.beisser]

On Thu, 29 Aug 2002, HD wrote:

> I have been wanting to install NetBSD 1.5.2 on them,
> and set up RAID 0 (plain striping??) so can double my
> capacity and get some performance advantage.

why?

you'd get a single drive capable of failure, instead of having 2 drives
per machine (that are both capable of failure). if you get a single error
on one of the two drives, you lose the data on both. not all that useful.
when you have a bunch of smaller disks, and need to combine then (3 or
more) in to one, then it's a good idea, but you still risk failure wiping
out all your data; so keep backups.

> Ok, so how do I do it? I want to ensure that / and
> swap are striped too. Does anyone here have any
> pointers on how to go about this task. I don't know if
> it is too ambitious to do so, when I am familiarizing
> myself with NetBSD, but then I figure that is how I am
> going to learn.

don't.

firstly, it's not worth concatinating 2 disks. it might boost performance,
but on disks that small, you're better off using one for the OS/swap and
the other for /home or equivelent.

secondly, i don't think you can boot off of a concatinated disk in any of
the BSDs. you'll probably need to have a single OS disk anyway.

but, it is a good way to learn. good luck, and have fun.

> Any help will be greatly appreciated.

sure. not all that familiar with NetBSD, though.

-------/ f. johan beisser /--------------------------------------+
  http://caustic.org/~jan                      jan at caustic.org
    "John Ashcroft is really just the reanimated corpse
         of J. Edgar Hoover." -- Tim Triche