Matthew, That explains it perfectly! However, let me throw this on the pile and let me have your opinion on it:
1) Hardware load balancing is an option (or so I found out from the people that built the server) .. Using ATA133 RAID. Being this is an option, should I hardware LB or software LB? 2) Personally, I like the idea of having 400gbs available. This server is a web / database / email / dns server. However, I'm desperately trying to see this in a more advanced light than "WOW, 400 gigs! WOOHOO!" :) That being said, is Raid 1 the best way to go? If it slows down writes, will it be noticeable? The one thing I DON'T want is noticeable speed lost. Is the Raid becoming corrupt in Raid 0 a common thing? I generally don't add to servers, I buy new ones.. So when I outgrow this production machine, it will get demoted to something else and I'll buy a bigger better production server. (meaning the chances of me adding additional harddisks is unlikely) 3) Does it matter that I'm planning an offsite location? Essentially, I'll backup all the web / email / db stuff to a server offsite. Although my backup server isn't as big as my production server (right now), I don't have 400 gigs of crap. I figure when I've outgrown my backup server, I can simply replace it. Many thanks for all your help.. It's greatly appreciated! Best Regards, Duane ***** Duane A. Stark Drastic Productions, LLC [EMAIL PROTECTED] > ------------Original Message------------- > From: Matthew Seaman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > To: Duane Stark <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > Date: Mon, Jul-28-2003 3:22 AM > Subject: Re: New Webserver with multiple drives > > On Sun, Jul 27, 2003 at 06:20:27PM -0500, Duane Stark wrote: > > > To preface this, I'm not OS retarded - just BSD retarded ;) I haven't had to mess > > with my current BSD server since I bought it, and now I have purchased a new p4 > > 3.0(something), 2 gig ram, 2 IDE 200gig HD's to replace it.. > > > > Here is my question: > > > > How do I setup these multiple drives? What does the "industry" recommend when it > > comes to setting them up? Should I set BSD up to think its one datasource (so > > 400gig) and then run from that? Or do I setup 1 drive to hold my web/mail/mysql, > > and the other to do something elsE? > > > > I'm totally lost, so any help would be greatly appericated.. PLEASE don't assume I > > know what your talking about, because it's a given that I dont! heh :) > > The only possible answer is "it depends". With disks there are 3 > characteristics that you can modify the balance between depending on > your needs. Those are resilience, available space and access speed. > There's also a fourth consideration, which may affect your choice but > that has little effect during the day-to-day operation of the system, > which is the amount of time and effort you're prepared to put into > doing sys-adminly things. > > Now, you've only got two disks, so that immediately rules out any > choices involving RAID5. You make no mention of any sort of hardware > raid controller, so I'll assume that isn't a possibility either. > > That leaves essentially 3 choices: > > i) No RAID at all. This scores highly on the ease of admin, as > it's the default way things are set up by sysinstall. Just > partition the disks, put filesystems on them and set up > /etc/fstab so the partitions get mounted in appropriate > locations. I'll take this as the baseline to compare the other > setups to. > > ii) RAID 0 or disk striping. This creates one synthetic 400Gb > partition from your two actual drives, by writing alternate > blocks of data to each drive. The block size is configurable: > at one extreme you could make the block size the same as the raw > disk size, in which case you'ld end up appending one disk to the > end of the other. However, the greatest advantage occurs when > the block size is round about the same size as the system can > read from the drive in one gulp. This spreads the load of any > IO evenly of the two drives and should maximize performance. > > The bad news is that if either of the disks becomes faulty, then > all of the disk space on your system will be unavailable. As > you add disks to the stripe, this problem becomes more and more > acute, so this setup is generally not used very much unless in > combination with RAID 5 or RAID 1 to give higher resilience. > > iii) RAID 1 or mirroring. Each drive contains a complete copy of all > of the data, maintained in parallel. The advantages are > improved resilience -- the system should just keep chugging > along merrily even if one of the drives self destructs -- and > improved IO performance on reads -- writes have to go to both > drives, which takes only slightly longer than writing to a > single drive, but reads can go to either drive which gives you > much better performance. (The biggest factor is the > milliseconds it takes to position the head and wait for the > drive to turn round until the correct block is under the head. > Talking between the CPU, RAM and the disk electronics takes of > the order of microseconds.) > > The bad news is that you've got to sacrifice half of your > potentially available disk capacity. However, assuming that the > resulting space is adequate for your needs, a mirrored root disk > setup is pretty standard for server machines. > > Either of ii) and iii) will probably entail your learning about > vinum(8) as the best available mechanism for doing software RAID on > FreeBSD. The alternatives are not that hot: ccd(4) is pretty ancient > and doesn't offer any means of recovering a mirrored partition than > backup and re-install should one drive fail. I've heard that NetBSD's > raidframe stuff is being ported to FreeBSD, but I don't think it's > ready for primetime use yet. > > See > http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/vinum/index.html > for a thorough introduction to vinum bootstrapping, > http://www.vinumvm.org/ for general information and > http://org.netbase.org/vinum-mirrored.html for a quick HOWTO set up a > bootable vinum root drive. > > Cheers, > > Matthew > > -- > Dr Matthew J Seaman MA, D.Phil. 26 The Paddocks > Savill Way > PGP: http://www.infracaninophile.co.uk/pgpkey Marlow > Tel: +44 1628 476614 Bucks., SL7 1TH UK > _______________________________________________ [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to "[EMAIL PROTECTED]"