# Gmirror whole disk or partitions



## Sylhouette (Aug 10, 2010)

Hello all.

I use gmirror all the time, for my servers.
I always use the whole disk as my mirror.

so my gmirror status always look similar to the following.


```
user@intranet ~ $ gmirror status
      Name    Status  Components
mirror/gm0  COMPLETE  ada0
                      ada1
```

now i used gpart on a new server, and used the following site to configure this.

http://www.unix-heaven.org/index.php?page=freebsd-raid1-gpt

But there they use gmirror to mirror each partition separate.

Are there any advantages or disavantages using this method, or the whole disk method.

Thanks for your time and advice.

regards,
Syl


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## aragon (Aug 10, 2010)

I mirror partitions.  An advantage for me is being able to dual boot.  Technically I guess one could dual boot if entire drives were mirrored, but I'm not about to try.


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## gkontos (Aug 10, 2010)

I can't think of any reason other than dual booting to mirror the partitions instead of the disks. After all, you mirror for redundancy and in case of a disk failure its faster to replace the disk than have to create all the partitions again.
Have you considered ZFS as an alternative ?

George


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