installer support mirrored hard drives with UFS? [SOLVED]

Questions about the installation of FreeBSD
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zinsuddu
Posts: 3
Joined: Sun Apr 15, 2018 3:50 am

installer support mirrored hard drives with UFS? [SOLVED]

Post by zinsuddu »

I have two questions before proceeding with my installation:
1. Are "advanced format" hard drives now detected automatically and formatted to use 4k sectors when formatting for UFS2 filesystem? Or do I have to do something special?
2. If I select two hard drives in the installer will it give me the option to create a UFS mirror?

From what I can see the GhostBSD installer is pretty darn good and I think that my intended installation will be ok, but I'd like to be warned if I'm wrong.
Last edited by zinsuddu on Tue Apr 17, 2018 12:17 pm, edited 1 time in total.
zinsuddu
Posts: 3
Joined: Sun Apr 15, 2018 3:50 am

Re: installer support mirrored WD Red hard drives with UFS?

Post by zinsuddu »

I see that no one replied because no warnings were needed --

This GhostBSD installer is very good! It not only allowed me to select my two Western Digital Red 1TB drives as the target for the installation, and choose to use them as a UFS/SU mirror, but it allowed me to select which specific algorithm to use for low-level policy (load, round-robin, etc.). It issued all the necessary gmirror commands for me and set up my disks perfectly. People installing FreeBSD from the command line won't even know that there are four choices for the disk balancing algorithm (I certainly didn't and I had checked the handbook and several tutorials).

The bonnie benchmark shows me that my mirror behaves as expected, VERY well (I expected UFS mirror to outperform ZFS mirror for me). Small file (100MB) writes to the mirror are slightly slower than for a single disk and reads are double the speed of a single disk. The system boot speed and application launches are about as fast as on my SSD drives.

BTW, it was straightforward to pull down the sources for FreeBSD 11 STABLE and update GhostBSD to the latest code. My GhostBSD 11-STABLE is running fine.

Congratulations on a great installer, this is probably the best way to install FreeBSD. The live environment was useful; when I encountered questions such as "load" vs "round-robin" mirroring algorithms I could jump on the web in Firefox and find answers. The pre-configured Mate desktop is very thoughtfully done, the fish shell is a nice touch (never used it before -- I like it!), everything is very nice!
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ericbsd
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Joined: Mon Nov 19, 2012 7:54 pm

Re: installer support mirrored hard drives with UFS? [SOLVED]

Post by ericbsd »

I am sorry that I did not answer before, but I am glad that you manage to install it.

I did try to make the installer has simple that is possible, but with most customization possible which not easy.
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