[Thus spake Matthias Petermann ("MP: ") 9:32pm...]

MP: Hi,
MP:
MP: last week I got a very worse experience on NetBSD FFS. I had to wait for
MP: about 7 minutes to complete a fsck of a 120 GB FFS disklabel,
MP: after my box crashed.

Please tell me you didn't put everything under that 120GB. :)

I know, I know, partitioning disks doesn't really help much and "makes
no sense now that we have larger disks", but I find that if I isolate
at least the OS-critical filesystems (/, /usr (or / and /usr), and /var)
to appropriately sized partitions, I can at least come up much quicker
and then, if I need to, I can run the remaining partitions later and
bring them on line as they become ready.

MP: * The second one could be to make some kind of background fsck
MP:   like FreeBSD 5.x does. I just played around with the fss0
MP:   snaphot device which seems to work. Are there any (experimental?)
MP: rc-scripts to use these mechanism for background fsck, or is
MP:   it impossible with the NetBSD implementation of FFSv2?

See above.  I think you just nailed it.

				--*greywolf;