John,
thank you very much for your detailed input.
> If it were me, I would a small (for some definition of small considering
> your disk space and software needs) partition on the first disk and install
> everything to that. After the system is up, create an identical partition
> on the second disk and set up gmirror between the two (see below). This
> volume would house either the entire OS or just the root partition at your
> option, but it needs to be large enough to house at least a minimal install
> of the OS temporarily. I'd then create additional partitions using the
> remaining space on each disk and turn those into a new, blank gstripe
> volume. If you don't want the whole OS on your mirror, you could then
> move /usr, etc over to the stripe volume (but you don't have to).
That's basically the answer I got in the meantime from a few of my
more experienced colleagues as well. So, I'll probably go with that
option and create a 512Mb root partition on the first disk, install
the OS, create a gmirror and add the second disk to the mirror, build
the RAID-1 array, then gstripe the rest and move /usr, /tmp, /var to
it etc.
On a side note, it would be nice if creating RAID arrays was included
in the FreeBSD install similar to Debian install (according to my
colleague, haven't seen it myself).
Regards,
--
Nino