From owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG  Tue Dec 21 16:59:01 2004
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Date: Tue, 21 Dec 2004 07:58:55 -0900
From: Peter Giessel <pgiessel@mac.com>
To: "Roger. O. Svenning" <roger@audioweb.no>
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cc: Jonathan Reeder <jreeder@minutemenu.com>
Subject: Re: Dell CERC SATA 2S question -- software RAID instead?
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On Tuesday, December 21, 2004, at 07:15AM, Roger. O. Svenning <roger@audioweb.no> wrote:

>Jonathan Reeder wrote:
>
>>Since the SATA RAID controller in the Dell PE SC420 isn't supported yet, is
>>there anything I can do with atacontrol to run my two drives as a software
>>RAID instead of relying on the controller?
>>
>>I've never used SATA before, so any advice anyone can offer is greatly
>>appreciated.
>>
>AFAIK you cant use software RAID on your system drives as the system has 
>to boot before software RAID can be loaded.
>Thus you would need a dedicated system drive which the system can boot 
>from in order to load software raid on the other two disks.

Not true.  Vinum is your friend (starting on the 16th page of the PDF):
http://www.vinumvm.org/cfbsd/vinum.pdf

If you are using 5.3, you probably want to look into gvinum...