Date: Thu, 11 May 2006 12:18:34 -0500 From: "Rick C. Petty" <rick-freebsd@kiwi-computer.com> To: Nagy L?szl? Zsolt <nagylzs@freemail.hu> Cc: Sam Clements <sclements@gmail.com>, freebsd-hardware@freebsd.org Subject: Re: SATA Raid motherboard Message-ID: <20060511171834.GA77251@megan.kiwi-computer.com> In-Reply-To: <446356DA.2070007@freemail.hu> References: <4463055F.1080404@freemail.hu> <61d60b9d0605110652i5e226712i9660a44093919dcd@mail.gmail.com> <446356DA.2070007@freemail.hu>
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On Thu, May 11, 2006 at 05:23:06PM +0200, Nagy L?szl? Zsolt wrote: > Sam Clements ?rta: > > > >I do believe only RAID 0 or 1 is supported in a two disk > >configuration. yes, the other RAID levels require 3 drives or more. > Also, note that ataraid cannot yet write this metadata > >format so you'll have to use the BIOS to create & rebuild your > >RAID's... > Thank you. Of course I can use the BIOS to create the mirrored set. But > after that, can I install FreeBSD with the standard installer? I'm not > sure if 'ataraid' is included in GENERIC. Will the installer notice the > RAID-1 array as a new physical drive? It depends on which version of FreeBSD you are using. Anything recent (5.4, 5.5, 6.0, 6.1) has ataraid in GENERIC. You'll probably have to setup the raid manually (instead of sysinstall) using atacontrol(8)-- the man page is pretty helpful. > Unfortunately, I do not have the > hardware yet, so I cannot try this. A real SCSI RAID controller would be > too expensive for me. If I cannot install the whole system on the > mirrored set, then probably it is better to use gvinum, because it > allows me to buy a cheaper motherboard and use different hard drives. > However, gvinum also has disadvantages (cannot mirror the root fs, or it > is too difficult and I'm not familiar with vinum...) Correct, gvinum has disadvantages, but mirroring the root FS is actually pretty easy: http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/vinum-root.html gvinum doesn't have all the functionality of the original vinum (yet). But if you're just using RAID-1 (mirroring), why not use gmirror(8)? From my observations, gmirror performs better than hardware mirroring, in general. -- Rick C. Petty
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