Mediaserver Raid 0

On my Mediaserver (OS is FreeBSD), Ive be battling with drive space, and im always shuffling content around.

Last night was the final straw.

I backed up my content to an external drive, and then I proceeded to create a stripe across my three drives. This will allow me to use and add each drives space and make it look like one giant volume.

Note. If you do this, drives do need to be of equal size.
I have three old IDE 110G drives, that I put to some use.

N.B.  Raid 0 provides no data redundancy.
Remember this exercise is to create a larger logical disk.

First we tell what Kernel to load for boot time.
echo 'geom_stripe_load="YES"' >> /boot/loader.conf

Load the kernel module
kldload geom_stripe

Although, I moved the data, and want to start off on a clean slate.
gpart destroy -F /dev/ada0
gpart destroy -F /dev/ada1
gpart destroy -F /dev/ada4

Now to create my stripe
gstripe label -v st0 /dev/ada0 /dev/ada4 /dev/ada1

bsdlabel -wB /dev/stripe/st0
newfs -U /dev/stripe/st0a

And thats that. Last is for me to add my stripe, so that is can be mounted on next reboot.
echo "/dev/stripe/st0a /mnt ufs rw 2 2" >> /etc/fstab

Here is a few commands to see how and what your stripe is doing.
gpart show
gstripe list
gstripe status


HTH
Brent