RAID 1 via ataraid(4)

[Dag-Erling Smørgrav]

David Schultz <das at FreeBSD.ORG> writes:
> I'm looking at getting a new box and wondering what people's
> experiences are with mirroring via ataraid(4) and various
> motherboards. Does it work?

Yes, it works, but GEOM works better (unless you want to stripe the
disk you boot from)

> At the moment I'm using gmirror (previously ccd until GEOM came
> along and ccd became unstable) with a dedicated unmirrored OS
> disk. But in accordance with Murphy's law, I've had the boot disk
> fail twice in the past five years, so I'd like to put the damn
> root fs on the mirror.

Just gmirror the boot disk, and make sure gmirror is either compiled
into the kernel or loaded at boot time (gmirror_load="YES" in
/boot/loader.conf).  You don't need BIOS support to boot from a mirror
set, unless the primary fails badly enoush that you can't boot from it
but not so badly that the BIOS will ignore it.

DES
-- 
Dag-Erling Smørgrav - des at des.no