Need advice on building a system with a Raid drive

[Bob Bomar]

On Wed, Jul 13, 2005 at 10:23:13AM -0500, Jim Freeze wrote:
> Hi
> 
> I am building a new system and plan to use two 
> 300GB drives in a raid 1 configuration. However,
> I have read where fbsd can't boot from a raid
> drive, but it is not clear why.
> 
> Can anyone confirm if this is a valid restriction?
> Will I really need a boot drive separate from my
> raid drives?
> 

I have 3 machines that boot from RAID 1 just fine, 1 uses
a Promise RAID Card, FastTrak 100 with 2 Hot Swap Enclosures, 
and the other 2 use the promise raid on the motherboards, one
is a MSI, other is Gigabyte.

I like the promise cards, as atacontrol(8) works great
with them.

dmesg from my server:

Drives:
ad4: DMA limited to UDMA33, non-ATA66 cable or device
ad6: DMA limited to UDMA33, non-ATA66 cable or device
ar0: 113487MB <ATA RAID1 array> [14467/255/63] status: READY subdisks:
 0 READY ad4: 114440MB <WDC WD1200JB-75CRA0> [232514/16/63] at ata2-master UDMA3
3
         ad4: SuperSwap enclosure [FAN:3879rpm TEMP:29.0C 5.103V 12.383V]
 1 READY ad6: 114440MB <WDC WD1200JB-75CRA0> [232514/16/63] at ata3-master UDMA3
3
         ad6: SuperSwap enclosure [FAN:4166rpm TEMP:28.0C 5.049V 12.261V]
ar1: 76293MB <ATA RAID1 array> [9726/255/63] status: READY subdisks:
 0 READY ad8: 76319MB <WDC WD800JB-00CRA1> [155061/16/63] at ata4-master UDMA100
          1 READY ad10: 76319MB <WDC WD800JB-00CRA1> [155061/16/63] at ata5-mast
er UDMA100
         Waiting 2 seconds for SCSI devices to settle
Mounting root from ufs:/dev/ar0s1a
da0 at isp0 bus 0 target 2 lun 0
da0: <IBM DCAS-34330W S60B> Fixed Direct Access SCSI-2 device 
da0: 40.000MB/s transfers (20.000MHz, offset 8, 16bit)
da0: 4134MB (8467200 512 byte sectors: 255H 63S/T 527C

Cards:
atapci1 at pci0:12:0:      class=0x010485 card=0x1275105a chip=0x5275105a rev=0x01 hdr=0x00
    vendor   = 'Promise Technology Inc'
    device   = 'PDC20276 Ultra133 TX2/FastTrak TX Lite EIDE Controller'
    class    = mass storage
    subclass = RAID

atapci0 at pci0:6:0:       class=0x010485 card=0x4d68105a chip=0x6268105a rev=0x02 hdr=0x00
    vendor   = 'Promise Technology Inc'
    device   = 'PDC20268R FastTrak100 TX2/TX4/LP EIDE controller'
    class    = mass storage
    subclass = RAID


-- 
Bob Bomar
bob at ibsd.us
-----------------------------
FreeBSD: The Power to Serve
http://www.freebsd.org

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