SATA, RAID and AHCI

[Andrew Falanga]

Hi,

As I mentioned in response to a thread started by someone wanting drivers for 
a Realtek 8111c NIC, I'm building a server for our church.  We purchased an 
ASUS motherboard, M3A78 PRO (in case it matters or anyone cares).  Everyone 
is already aware of FreeBSD's lack of driver support for the RTL8111c NIC 
which, unfortunately, is embedded on this MOBO.

This question is about the storage settings for this board (ASUS' name for it 
is "Storage Configuration").  In the CMOS (or whatever it's called these 
days, just out of curiousity, will FreeBSD support things like OpenBoot or 
UEFI on i386, sorry for the digression), I found where to turn the "Storage 
Configuration," as ASUS calls it, from "IDE," to "RAID," or "AHCI."  It's 
currently set to "IDE" because when set to RAID the MOBO apparently kept 
trying to put the SATA DVD drive as part of the RAID and when set to AHCI 
mode the install had hundreds of, "can't create symlink, no inodes free," 
during the copying of the files into the newly created file systems.

Now, I'm a complete neophyte to making these SATA RAID systems.  What's the 
magic to making it work, and how do you keep the DVD drive from being part of 
the RAID?  Also, what should be done for AHCI mode?  It looked as though in 
this mode the drives would perform *much* faster.

Thanks,
Andy