softraid: your experiences and suggestions?

[dogeoj]

Hi guys,

I was looking into softraid but I didn't find a lot of doc, especially about the management aspect. I am unclear about a few things:

I didn't exactly understand how to replace a failed drive in a mirror. It seems the first step to building the mirror is to disklabel the whole drives as RAID (not documented in disklabel manpage as far as I could see) and then once the softraid device is setup, you disklabel the softraid device all over again with your individual slices. Is this right? So then if a device fails you detach it and then attach a new one. But do you have to disklabel and set it to RAID before you attach, or does the attach do a bitwise copy of the remaining devices in the softraid device automagically.. or something else?

After you configure a softraid device is it possible to read the individual drives separately? I'm kinda concerned, given the combination of my lack of UNIX prowess over the past twenty years and the terse doc, that a situation could arise where I can't get my data...which would be directly opposite to the reason I want to do this.

Yes, RAID mirror is my backup strategy. I am worried about disk failure, not about doing something dumb.

If you have any comments or stories about softraid on recent OpenBSD versions please post your experiences!

Thanks,

Joe