Topic: Promise Raid

[Dave Conzatti]

ive been running a server on a single ide drive for a while.
ive got a older promise raid card "fasttrak100" and 4 identical ide drives
im wanting to use this card in a raid 0+1 array. when i try and install 5.1 it cant find any drives. will 5.5 support this? where do i find out what is supported hardware and what isint?

thank you in advance.
Dave Conzatti

[Gary Parker]

Hey Dave,
    The Promise and HighPoint controllers have come up a few times on the lists here. AFAIK there is no native support in the kernel version present in SME 5.1.2 or 5.5 as it requires a 2.4 kernel version. From discussion on the dev-info list it seems that a move to 2.4 is planned for SME 6.0

There are a few work-arounds possible at the moment. You can manually upgrade your system to 2.4 kernel. This was covered on the dev-info list and I beleive there's an ISO available from Shad Lords that will do this, although it's not perfect.

Your other option is to manually tell the kernel that there are IDE devices availabe at whatever memory addresses the Promise card is using and mount the drives from there. I tried this with a Promise Ultra100 TX2 and couldn't get the drives to operate at anything better than PIO 33, performance was awful

I'd say you ought to check out clarkconnect if you're desperate for this functionality or wait for 6.0 to surface (which could be a while)...

Gary

[Robert]

Install E-smith 4.1.2;
Then download the promise drivers for redhat from www.promise.com;
Put the drivers on a floppy;
Login as root and go to the floppy. (/mnt/floppy)
Give the command: sh install;
Choose to load the driver everytime the server restarts;
Restart and you'll be able to access the drives on your promise raid card.

[Charlie Brady]

Robert wrote:

> Restart and you'll be able to access the drives on your
> promise raid card.

The standard advice seems to be to ignore Promise "hardware" RIAD. It's effectively just software RAID, and the standard linux kernel software raid is faster and possibly more reliable. Search around with google and see what other people are saying.

Charlie