Topic: E-Smith 5.6 Raid Support

[Moi]

Will E-Smith 5.6 support IDE Raid Controllers.

as an inexpensive alternative it would be nice to build a box
using something like a Promise Raid Card.
(Dual Channel ATA 133)

Will the updated RH 8.0 Kernel have support for this hardware ?


Thanks ?

[Andrej]

Moi wrote:
>
>
> Will E-Smith 5.6 support IDE Raid Controllers.
>
> as an inexpensive alternative it would be nice to build a box
> using something like a Promise Raid Card.
> (Dual Channel ATA 133)
>
> Will the updated RH 8.0 Kernel have support for this hardware ?
>
>
> Thanks ?

I have an ASUS P4S533-E MotherBoard with PROMISE RAID onboard... SME 5.6 b7 DOES NOT find any driver for this controler

Andrej

[XeTroC]

i've got the same problem... i would like to get sme to support my promise fasttrak100 or my promise ultraDma100 but i cant seem to find out how.

My problem is that i have two onboard ide channels which SME supports, but i have one cdrom, one cdrw, and two harddisks connected so there is no more room... and i would like to get some more storage space on the server.

there must be some clever person out there that can help with this problem... i know what i want for christmas this year!!!

[Darrin]

OK,

  I keep seeing people playing with all the different IDE raid controllers with no success. The secret to having success with these systems is staying away from  the flavors of the day/week/month (ie: Promise, HighPoint, etc). There is a very stable working controller that I use with my Linux / Windows servers with no problems.

Please see http://www.lsilogic.com -> look for the Megaraid i4

It is deadly fast, rock solid, easy to install and can be found with some searching - I have a source if anyone is interested they can Email me.

This controller looks to any OS like a Megaraid SCSI controller.

Darrin

[Charlie Brady]

XeTroC wrote:

> i've got the same problem... i would like to get sme to
> support my promise fasttrak100 or my promise ultraDma100 but
> i cant seem to find out how.

I have an MSI K7T Turbo motherboard with on-board Promise Fasttrak 100 Lite RAID.

Here's my recipe:

- Forget about the RAID capabilities of the Promise controller. It's no better than linux software RAID, and is less portable. You have a lot of trouble finding drivers and making them work. Just use the controller as an ATA100 pair, and use software RAID.
- Do a system backup
- Attach your two raid drives as primary on the 1st and 2nd ide channels. Attach your CDROM drive on one of the channels.
- Install 5.5 in mirror mode
- Reboot, and do your basic system configuration
- Restore from backup - you will now be running RAID over ATA33.
- Upgrade to 5.6beta7. Be sure to make a boot floppy.
- Reboot - you will now be running RAID, probably with DMA automatically enabled.
- Shut down, move the hard drives to the Promise controller
- Reboot - if you are lucky, as I was, you will be running RAID1
UDMA5, ATA100. The two drives will be connected on /dev/hde and /dev/hdg. "hdparm -t" reports about 45MB/s for each drive.
- Add your other drives or give them to friends.

Regards

Charlie

[Rob Walker]

I installed esmith 5.6 beta 7 on a 3ware 7500-4 raid controller
with no problem.  The install found it just fine.  We haven't
gotten around to installing the 3Ware cli software yet, but don't
have any reason to think it won't work.

rob

[Buddy Edwards]

Charlie, I agree with you on the software raid except for one thing and that is hard disk failure. A raid controller is designed to sense a drive failure and switch over to the other drive without interuption.  If this is a non critical application it wouldn't be a problem but if you are relying on your equipment to be up most of the time it has potential to give you a false sense of security because when a disk fails so does your system.

Thanks
Buddy Edwards