I am planning to put up a FreeBSD system, probably 4.8-RELEASE when it appears, to manage backups from a number of Unix and unix-like systems on a LAN.
Backups will be written nightly over the LAN to a local disk system and transfered regularly to tape via a scsi tape-drive. I am under pressure to make this system fairly reliable with respect to hardware failure - particularly disk drives. The thought is to use a couple of fairly large drives, say 120 or 160Gb running as a mirrored pair using vinum. Having no experience with vinum or software RAID systems a number of questions come to mind: 1) All the examples appear to use scsi drives; but I assume EIDE are also usable? IDE seems to be pretty good these days and much cheaper than scsi. 2)To what extent can the system be fully mirrored? Without RAID hardware it seems to me that a conventional disk partition outside the mirrored volume is probably necessary for mounting / ; is this true? 3)If the regular partition is necessary can this be taken as a modest slice from one of the disks whose major part is devoted to the mirror volume, and perhaps the corresponding slice on the other used for swap? 4)If the converse is true that the entire system can reside inside the mirrored volume then do I need a temporary additional disk to build the system? In any case it seems that an outside region or separate physical disk would be better for swap. Are there any RAID/vinum gurus out there that are willing to point me in the right direction? Malcolm Kay To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
