FreeBSD 5.3 SATA / RAID1 questions for migration from ATA

[Andreas Klemm]

Hi,

I bought a new socket 939 MSI mainboard
(amd64, MSI K8N NEO2 Platinum, S.939 NVIDIA Nforce3 Ultra)
and am planning now how I could best make use of it and
its BIOS mirroring capabilities.

In an ideal world I would dream of
- creating a BIOS based mirror on 2 new SATA drives
- then install XP and FreeBSD on these bios based mirrord disks.
- finally move old data to new mirrored disks and thats it.

After reading the mailinglists I have the feeling that
- BIOS created mirrors are not useable for a FreeBSD 5.3 installation.
But I also read
- that its possible to create a mirror once you have a FreeBSD installed.

Does this mean, that the BIOS based mirror as well as the
FreeBSD based mirror solution are partition based ?
Or is it mixed, that the BIOS based solution mirrors per
disk and the FreeBSD one per partition ?

Other questions involved: how well does Serial ATA in 5.3 ?

Currently I see the following scenario.

a) Buy 2 SATA disks, create BIOS mirror, install XP
   move data from ATA disks to new SATA disks

b) keep the old ATA disks for FreeBSD only and dont mirror them
  from BIOS.
   Optionally mirror them from within FreeBSD.
   Installation would be done newly on one disk, then a magic
   ata command tells to do a mirror with 2nd disk or related.

Does somebody make some experiences with scenarios like this
so that I could ask questions or ideally could do a 
phonecall in english or german ?

Thanks a lot for helping me

	Andreas ///

-- 
Andreas Klemm - Powered by FreeBSD 5.1-CURRENT
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