SUMMARY: SDS/SVM on USB disks possible?

Thanks to everybody for your feedback. Here are the official results:

Summary: Yes, it works, but certainly not for the boot device. (currently,
my USB stick is defined as a one-way mirror and holds the primary metadb).

But read on...

My test device (USB stick) was not recognized as a disk in format(1M), but
is accessible as any other disk device (it became /dev/dsk/c3t0d0 after
running devfsadm). Since format did not see it, I had to put a VTOC on it
using fmthard. Not funny.

After that, metadb -fac3 worked (slow - USB1.1), and so did the metainit.
Next, I created a filesystem on the metadevice, entered it in /etc/vfstab
with a mount-at-boot=yes, options=logging, mount-pass=2 (early boot!), and
rebooted. Everything worked flawless, but: the VOLD tried to unmount the
stick (and failed to do so). Not a real problem.

Again, only USB 1.1, meaning: I have a write rate at 770kb/s. I dont have
a PCI USB2.0 adapter in my machine.

Interesting links:
http://supportforum.sun.com/hardware/index.php?t=msg&goto=8964&rid=0#msg_8964
(read ENTIRE!)

1. SunBlade 100 has only USB1.1 - not enough bandwidth to seriously connect
a hard disk.
2. There are reports from users who installed a USB 2.0 card which was seen
by cfgadm.
3. There are users which succeeded to connect a large (>130GB) disk via USB
without any problems (see link above)
4. There are others, who reported that they still have a 130GB limit...

5. The best solution by far seems to be a IDE-to-SCSI-Bridge, which will be
the solution I tend to use. But be careful, there are bridges which also
have a 130GB limit in it's controller.

Using the IDE-to-SCSI-Bridge will give you the guerantee to have SDS and
even boot support, if you have a bootable SCSI card. So this is the choice.

Peter

> ----- Original Message -----
>
> > Hi there,
> >
> > does anybody know if it's possible to mirror two USB disks connected to
a
> > SunBlade 100 using SDS/SVM?
> >
> > I'm planning to buy two such disks, but need to mirror them against each
> > other to prevent data loss.
> >
> > Thank you for your thoughts.
> >
> >   Peter
> > _______________________________________________
> > sunmanagers mailing list
> > sunmanagers@sunmanagers.org
> > http://www.sunmanagers.org/mailman/listinfo/sunmanagers
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