Hardware raid boot disks on m5000

Is it possible to configure a raid 1 on boot disks to this machine?
The M5000 has the LSI 1064 controller and it seems to be possible..
After booting from dvd (boot cdrom -s):
# raidctl -c -r 1 c0t0d0 c0t1d0
Creating RAID volume will destroy all data on spare space of member disks,
proceed (yes/no)? y
Operation not support with volume of this level.
The controller is in GOOD state...
# raidctl -S
0 "LSI_1064"
0.0.0 GOOD
0.1.0 GOOD
3 "LSI_1064"
# format
Searching for disks...done
AVAILABLE DISK SELECTIONS:
0. c0t0d0 <SUN146G cyl 14087 alt 2 hd 24 sec 848>
/pci@0,600000/pci@0/pci@8/pci@0/scsi@1/sd@0,0
1. c0t1d0 <SUN146G cyl 14087 alt 2 hd 24 sec 848>
/pci@0,600000/pci@0/pci@8/pci@0/scsi@1/sd@1,0
Any ideas?
Many thanks,
Mauro.

I configured mirror boot disk using Solaris Volume Manager...

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    But why on earth would you want to boot from an external Firewire drive? First, there is the issue of speed. You have a mini, let's assume it is a one generation back Intel. It has an internal SATA drive on a 1.5 Gbps connection. You want to move that to a 400 Mbps Firewire bus? Next, beyond the speed issues, you have a persistence issue. You are taking the boot volume and moving into to a transitory bus. One of Firewire's greatest strengths is easy connection/disconnection. Persistence is not a strong point.
    Next, if your plan is to move the boot volume to some form of a Firewire RAID, then you are even penalizing yourself more. The mini has one FireWire port. If you are using two devices and creating a mirror RAID, then you need to daisy chain. Talk about points of failure, asynchronous startup time, bus blocking, etc. Not wise.
    Plus, I can not count how many external firewire devices have burnt up in the effort to have small footprints. Lacie and the "let's put a drive in a metal case with no fan" approach = melted drive. Western Digital and Lacie with the "let's make a completely un-reusable external power brick that either breaks in a small breeze or falls out when the heavy guy walks by the server" approach.
    If you are looking at a Firewire RAID enclosure, then you are missing the objective of speed as you are limited by the 400 bus. It is nice to say that you have a four drive SATA 2 RAID case running a RAID 5, but you are defeating the purpose of why you bought the raid. The RAID 5 can provide an exponential increase in I/O performance. But that goes out the window because of the slow bus.
    If your argument is that "this is a server and my bottleneck is Ethernet," that too does not hold up. You are likely running on a gigabyte network.
    For system details check out http://developer.apple.com/documentation/HardwareDrivers/Conceptual/Macmini_0602 /Articles/architecture.html.
    Take this with a grain of salt. You caught me on a grumpy day as yesterday I dealt with a melted external firewire drive.
    My advice is buy real server class hardware. What is you objective? Drive redundancy? Capacity? A mini is a great dev server. Not a production server. This is your data. Presumably the data that makes your business function. Don't trust it to a single platter. And don't trust it to a consumer level, disposable system. I am not trying to malign the mini. It is a fine machine for its role. Its role however is not to be a production file server. Now as a web server, we are talking a different situation.
    Ok, I am rambling. Hope this helps in some way.

  • Some configurations such as a software or hardware RAID do not support a recovery partition and can't be used with Find My Mac.

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