RAID 0 After the install?

[Joe Pokupec]

Hey All,

I'd like to use RAID 0 one ATA in my FreeBSD box (it's 4.7 right now, but I
plan to upgrade to 5.1 this week). I have some basic questions, if they've
been answered already, maybe someone could point me to a link:

- If I use a hardware ATA RAID card, are there certain system settings
required for FreeBSD to recognize this, or is the RAID format done at a
platform-independent level (BIOS or other boot utilities)?

- If one of the 2 hard drives fail, the data will still be visible and
accessible on the remaining drive correct? How easy is it to replace the
failed drive? Will the data from the good drive automatically copy over to
the newly replaced drive or are there a lot of shenanigans involved?

- Is it possible to stripe only 1 drive as RAID 0 with the intention of
dropping in another drive later? The idea here would be stripe the first
drive, copy the data from the data drive to the newly striped drive, then
add the second drive. This would save the need to find a 3rd large hard
drive for the transfer process.

Thanks

Joe