Topic: ATA100 IDE Card info required...

[Gary Parker]

Hi folks....
   I'm in the market for an ATA100 ide card to drop into my box at the moment and as the highpoint cards are out of the question I was interested by the Promise TX2 Ultra ATA100 x4 which scan.co.uk are selling for £28 at the moment. I've read vastly varying reports on it across the web, some people claiming that it simply will not work with linux and others saying that it needs kernel 2.4.13.

None of the threads on the forum here seem to have been resolved, I don't know if people got 'em working or not...

Has anyone actually got one of these working in a 5.1.2 box and did it need a new kernel to do it?

Alternatively, can anyone recommend another relatively cheap ATA100 card that will work? I'm not particularly bothered about RAID as linux can do raid in software just as well as most of the cheapo cards anyway and I'm not interested in shelling out for an Adaptec 2400...

Gary

[Dominik]

Look at this:

http://forums.contribs.org/index.php?topic=10247.msg38645#msg38645

It helped me to get my Promise Fasttrack100 to work in an SME 5.1.2 server.

[Gary Parker]

Cheers Dominik..
   I think I'll order myself one of those this afternoon, then

Gary

[Gary Parker]

Well....the card arrived next day so I popped it in on Friday night and have been scratching my head since then trying to get the damn thing to work.

I followed the instructions as given in the link above and this works fine in the hdd's are detected at startup and I can quit happily fdisk them and mke2fs on them, only problem is speed...and it's a big problem!!!

hdparm -tT /dev/hde consistently reports < 2Mb/s, not good...the problem is that hdparm -d1 returns the following:-
   /dev/hde:
   setting using_dma to 1 (on)
   HDIO_SET_DMA failed: Operation not permitted
   using_dma    =  0 (off)

Anyone got a workaround/fix for this under 5.1.2?

Oh yeah, spec...2 x IBM 60GXP 40Gb hdd's, both set to master on each channel on a Promise Ultra100 TX2. System is 2 x Pentium Pro on P6FX2A motherboard with 440FX chipset and 256Mb RAM.

Any ideas would be greatly appreciated....

Gary

[Dominik]

I use the IDE HDD on my Fasttrack100 Controller only for data backups. My system is a SCSI system so I didn't recognize this problem.

But you can try this:

hdparm -c3 -m16 /dev/xx

for 32-bit I/O mode with syncronisation and 16 sektores per interrupt.

I get < 6,5 MB/s with this options. That is not the maximum like DMA but it is better than nothing.
Try the hdparm -tT /dev/xxx four or five times in a row, because linux has a very good cache to get a better average of the HDD speed.
Play a little bit with the options of hdparm to get the optimal settings.

To make the settings permanent at every boot up I thing you can make this in /etc/rc.d/rc.local
The best is to test this with a new template of this file.

---
setting using_dma to 1 (on)
HDIO_SET_DMA failed: Operation not permitted
using_dma = 0 (off)

The message could mean that the kernel didn't support DMA. I don't know exactly because I am not a linux professional.

I hope that I could help you a little bit.

Regards,

Dominik

[Gary Parker]

Cheers Dominik...not really much help as I was getting ~10Mb/s with the drives on the motherboard's onboard IDE controller which is only bus-mastering ATA33, the whole point of getting the Promise card was so that I could use the ATA100 capabilities of my hdd's.

I emailed Promise tech support last night and politely asked them to either release the source for the driver or make a binary release for 2.2.19 UP and SMP.

I doubt very much that I'll get either but it's worth a try...

Gary