[NTLUG:Discuss] Help with Promise FastTrak Tx2000

[Courtney Grimland]

On Mon, 10 Nov 2003 15:55:51 -0600
"gan hawk" <ganhawk1 at hotmail.com> wrote:

> I am surprised Promise uses software for its RAID stuff. I thought
> thats what the PDC chip onboard was supposed to do!

The Fasttrak line of RAID cards is not really what you think of as
hardware RAID.  The RAID functions are implemented in the driver
rather than in the hardware, which loses a lot of the speed advantages
of a striped RAID array.  The linux kernel has (experimental - you
have to enable "experimental support" in your kernel for it to show
up as a config option) support for these hybrid RAID controllers, and
it seems to work pretty well. I've been using one for a while and
haven't had any problems. Then again, I wouldn't consider mine very
heavily stressed, so keep in mind what you paid for that endorsement.

I believe the Supertrak line of IDE RAID cards is Promise's "real"
hardware RAID stuff.  More expensive, and you still have the limits of
IDE to deal with.  The Fasttrak is aimed for the low-budget home user
who wants some of the advantages of RAID while using cheaper IDE
drives.

Here's a little HOWTO I just found:

http://www.faqs.org/docs/Linux-HOWTO/Linux-Promise-RAID1-HOWTO.html

They set up the drives differently than I did, so I can't vouch for
the accuracy or helpfulness of the HOWTO.


My box looks like this:

Onboard (primary) IDE controller:
hda1 - ext3 (everything linux lives here)
hda2 - swap
hdc - DVD
hdd - CDRW

Onboard (secondary) Promise IDE/RAID controller:
ataraid/d0 - the raid device itself (analagous to "hda")
ataraid/d0p1 - NTFS (WinXP lives here -- analagous to "hda1")

I set mine up to stripe two 20GB drives to appear as a 40GB drive and
installed WinXP there.  Mainly because Star Wars Galaxies was
thrashing the disk pretty bad when it was on a single drive, and I
thought I'd try the RAID setup to see if it helped.  It seems to keep
disk activity down during play, so I left it that way.