n j wrote:
> 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).
I agree, but this would take a non-trivial effort to make happen. I
hope you'll consider working on it or perhaps contributing resources to
fund the people who could do it.
The way I approached your initial challenge was to install everything to
a large, cheap SATA drive. On the for-real drives I gmirror the root
partition, stripe swap and tmp, ran graid3 on /var and /usr, and then
dump | restored from the large/cheap drive to the array.