[Nottingham] Big biiig problem regarding IDE-RAID

[Graeme Fowler]

What a coincidence...

On Tue, 15 Jul 2003, Martin wrote:
> IDE-RAID is all well and good if supported. Unfortunately, some of the 
> later Promise chipsets are not useable yet via Linux. Also depends on 
> how good the BIOS support is also...

I've spent a proportion of the morning running a new Intel server mobo with 
integrated IDE-RAID through its' paces. First observation was how slow it was 
to create the array as compared to (say) a Megaraid SCSI card (but then 
Adaptec cards take an unnecessarily long time, also).

First OS to attempt to install: RH9. It immediately saw both disks as separate 
devices (hde and hdg) instead of an array. So we toddle over to Promise's site 
and find the drivers for the Fastrak100 card (which the embedded chipset 
emulates, apparently) and find that they're identical to the ones on the Intel 
driver disk. And only go as far as RH7.3.

Googling around we eventually found a thread which had hundreds of "IDE RAID, 
Promise card, install fails" entries... followed by a single "try the Fastrak 
2000TX driver" entry. Boom! That driver not only supports all the cards, it 
goes through RH8 and 9 (as well as some slightly more esoteric OSes).

So finally we got it in there, and working. Which is a good start.

> And the world can be split into those that have never had a HDD fail, 
> and those that religiously do backups...

Indeed. Also add the sub-category "those who are fed up paying through the 
nose for large capacity SCSI disks when IDE drives are now fast enough and 
vastly more capacious, at the same time as being a whole heap cheaper" :)

G