From owner-freebsd-stable Tue Jun 18 16:10: 8 2002 Delivered-To: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org Received: from postfix3-2.free.fr (postfix3-2.free.fr [213.228.0.169]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 7BE4D37B405 for ; Tue, 18 Jun 2002 16:09:48 -0700 (PDT) Received: from anphor (montpellier-1-a7-62-147-82-85.dial.proxad.net [62.147.82.85]) by postfix3-2.free.fr (Postfix) with SMTP id 1C7A418775 for ; Wed, 19 Jun 2002 01:09:46 +0200 (CEST) From: "Patrick Bihan-Faou" To: Subject: RE: the new ATA driver vs. vinum Date: Wed, 19 Jun 2002 01:09:10 +0200 Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Priority: 3 (Normal) X-MSMail-Priority: Normal X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook IMO, Build 9.0.2416 (9.0.2911.0) In-reply-to: <0fb301c2170c$df665ff0$0900a8c0@max> X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V6.00.2600.0000 Importance: Normal Sender: owner-freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG Written by John Nielsen > Written by Patrick Bihan-Faou >> The documentation of the RAID features of the new ata driver are scarce, >> and >> after searching the FreeBSD site, I am still wondering how it should be >> used. If someone can provide some pointers to more complete >> documentation, this would be really welcome. [...] > Bear in mind that atacontrol is a utility to interact with a hardware ATA > raid controller, and doesn't do RAID itself. Vinum allows you to do RAID > without any special hardware. ATA RAID was possible in 4.5, you > just had to > rely on the RAID controller's BIOS to set it up and manage it if > there was a problem. This is where the man page for atacontrol is really confusing: " Allthough the ATA driver allows for creating an ATA RAID on disks on any controller, there are restrictions. It is only pos- sible to boot on an array if its either located on a "real" ATA RAID controller like the Promise or Highpoint controllers, or if the RAID declared is of RAID1 or SPAN type, in case of a SPAN the partition to boot must reside on the first disk in the SPAN. " This paragraph (describing the 'ata create' command) seems to indicate that you can create RAID arrays with any controller. Booting from such an array may be problematic, but this is not my concern. So is the 'RAID' capability of the controller a requirement or not ? BTW, this is what triggered my question :) Patrick. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-stable" in the body of the message