Topic: IDE Controller UDMA 133

[Mikis Brenner]

I want to expand my  e-smith/Mitel Server with an IDE UDMA 133 Controller to burst up the HD access. I'm thinking about an Advance 29133 or a Promise Ultra 133 TX2, which I can get  easily here in germany.

Has anybody any experience with this cards and is the installation easy on a e-smith/mitel server & gateway Ver. 5?

Thanks for any tip...

Mikis

[Judy Morgann]

Hi,

the Promise Ultra 133 TX2 is very cheap too! If you only want  to use it to add more harddisks to your e-smith box, it works fine. Just plug it to the mainboard, connect and partition the harddisks with eg cfdisk...
The hardware RAID works too and it´s really fast!!!
But if you want to boot from the controller i don´t know if it´s possible. I tried booting RedHat 7.2 from RAID1 without success. However FreeBSD 4.4 can boot from it.

greetings
judy

[Mikis Brenner]

Thanks for the Info.

I need the ATA133 controller only for one 120 GB Maxtor ATA 133 HD - no raid 0/1.

But this should work too - i've read something about a custom boot disk with a changed kickstart-script  - hope, it works...

Mikis

[Judy Morgann]

Hi,

you don´t need a custom boot disk if you only want to connect 1 harddisk and install e-smith on it. just check your bios an change the boot options to boot from scsi first. the promise controller is detected as scsi-controller. if there are no other ide harddisks switch off the both onboard ide controller in the bios.

hope this helps and much fun with your new disk
judy

[Alexander Ziemann]

Hi,

you will in no case need a raid controller of what sort ever to run a single ATA disk.

No speed improvement at all. Only more of these driver problems. An onboard DMA66 controller will absolutely do for all single drives, which only transfer data at rates up to <= 40 MB/s.

Alex

[Mikis Brenner]

Hi,

I need the controller for speed improvement cause the onboard ide is only DMA33 and the BIOS has HD size limitations. It's a Siemens D1064 in a Senic Pro with a PII 350.

The promise comes with a boot rom - so it's an easy workaround for this prob...

I will try it on the weekend and will report it later ...

Mikis

[Mikis Brenner]

Hi.

I've tried to install the Ver 5.1 Beta 4 Server & Gateway on a UDMA133 HD attached to a Promise 133 TX2, but no success at all. Install stops with a kernel panic/error - no device is found...

The Promise controller isn't found as an ISDN controller, as said in a posting above...

Any clues/tips?

Thanks,
Mikis.

[Mikis Brenner]

Sorry... not ISDN... SCSI...

Mikis