Absolute FreeBSD, 3rd Edition

10DISKS, PARTITIONING, AND GEOM

A sysadmin can’t overemphasize the importance of managing disks and filesystems. (Go ahead, try to emphasize it too much. I’ll wait.) Your disks contain your data, making reliability and flexibility paramount to the operating system. FreeBSD supports a variety of filesystems and has many different ways to handle them. In this chapter, we’ll consider the most common disk tasks every sysadmin performs.

First, let’s discuss the most important thing to remember about storage devices.

Disks Lie

Once upon a time, a sysadmin could make decisions about a disk based on the information it provided. You could plug in a hard ...