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Date: Mon, 18 Aug 1997 21:09:21 -0700 (PDT)
From: Doug White <dwhite@gdi.uoregon.edu>
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Reply-To: Doug White <dwhite@resnet.uoregon.edu>
To: "Amir Y. Rosenblatt" <amir@i33.com>
cc: questions@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject: Re: Bootable hardware RAID solutions?
In-Reply-To: <19970818152904.21746@i33.com>
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On Mon, 18 Aug 1997, Amir Y. Rosenblatt wrote:

> I'm preparing to rebuild my FreeBSD 2.2.2 box and want to make it somewhat
> more fault-tolerant than it is now.  I'm interested in using a Mylex
> SCSI-SCSI RAID card (in an enclosure with apair of hot-swappable disks) to
> do mirroring and I'm wondering if such a device is compatible with FreebD
> 2.2.2-stable (I would assume it is since it just sits on the SCSI chain
> and pretends to be a disk) and if I'd be able to actually boot my system
> from that sort of RAID (i.e. is it transparent enough to pretend to be my
> boot disk or do I need to use some other disk for that and just stick
> everything else on it?)?  

I don't believe Mylex hardware is supported, unless it emulates something
else.  DPT makes RAID adapters and they do have a FreeBSD driver (not
shipped w/ FreeBSD but easily installed).

Whether such a disk system is bootable or not is a function of the
controller.  I would assume that it would support something like that
since as you mention, a RAID array looks like a big disk to the rest of
the system.

You might also look at ccd if you don't need hot-swappability.  It can be
configured to do mirroring if you're using identical disks, and it can do
striping as well.  See ccd(4).

Doug White                              | University of Oregon  
Internet:  dwhite@resnet.uoregon.edu    | Residence Networking Assistant
http://gladstone.uoregon.edu/~dwhite    | Computer Science Major
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