ATA mirroring solution required

[Chris Smith]

Hi,

Got a bit of a sticky situation.  I have a bog standard Compaq AP230
workstation with two IDE channels and 3 devices so far (two CDROM
devices and a hard disk).  I want to add a second disk as a software
RAID1 mirror of the primary disk.  I know how to do this in FreeBSD so
thats not a problem - the hardware side is.

The only available IDE port I have would be shared with the existing
hard disk i.e two hard disks in RAID1 on the primary IDE chain.  AFAIK
this is bad for performance reasons.

Drives are both Seagate 7200rpm 40Gb ATA100 and the controller supports
ATA100 also.  Running 4.8-STABLE.

Where do I go?

I was looking for a secondary controller to give each drive it's own
channel on the controller (ie a promise/HPT one) but have no experience
with these under FreeBSD.  Can someone recommend one if possible that
works flawlessly or an alternative solution?

Solutions must be cheap i.e under 50 UKP as the wife will kill me for
spending any more ;-)

Cheers all

-- 
Chris Smith
http://www.infinitemonkeys.org.uk/