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Fastrak Source

I've been using this to support our TX2000 Pro cards under Debian, seeing as though the pre-compiled drivers are for winblows/Redhate/Suse...

Worked fine for me. Not huge on stats, but you can cat /proc/scsi/FastTrak or something like that if I remember correctly...

Your also asking about adding a drive to a RAID array. Some drive arrays will allow this, but generally speaking it won't. If you want to add a drive to an array you'll generally have to pull your data off of your drive array first. Once this is done, than the drive array can be rebuilt. This is very much dependent upon the card, and not the manufacture.

As for two disks going out, this is enough to make your whole RAID array fail. This is why if one disk in a RAID array fails it's critical to replace it immeadiately. This leads to many RAID drive arrays having a hot spare capability in addition to hot swap (yes this is available on IDE).

Added Information:

I wrote the Slashdot story. I've gotten additional information since then:

First, I don't see any evidence of low quality in ECS motherboards. Both ECS and Fry's employees say that the high rate of returns is due to the fact that the low cost attracts people who are very inexperienced at building computers. That seems right to me. An ECS sales representative mentions that Fry's uses ECS motherboards in the computers it builds. The ECS motherboards are suitable for business use. They may not be the best for overclockers or gamers.

I wrote a long letter to Promise Technology Technical Support about the fact that Promise is allowing ECS motherboards with Promise RAID mirroring controlers to be sold without software that is necessary to monitor the health of the mirror. The letter is below, and represents my opinions at the time. Even though the national sales manager of Promise suggested I send the letter, there was no answer.

Below the letter is all information and opinions that I had available at the time.

___________________


TO:
Kevin Hong
Promise Technology Technical Support Engineer


Kevin,

Jason Turk told me to write to you about a problem with Elitegroup's L7VTA Rev. 1.0 motherboard, which includes a Promise RAID controller chip.

Elitegroup says they have never been provided the FastCheck or PAM monitoring software for this motherboard. Can you supply monitoring software that is certified by Promise to work? The software is not on the CD supplied with the motherboard.

We need not just software that appears to work, we need software that is certified by Promise Technology to work with this motherboard. Several people at Promise have told me that the software provided on the Promise web site for the Promise RAID controller adapter cards may not work with the OEM controller chips installed on motherboards. I suspect this is not true, but merely a Promise Technology marketing scheme. However, we can't risk selling these to our customers and finding later that there is some hidden serious defect.

Thanks,

Michael Jennings
Futurepower Computer Systems

_______________________________


Complete Information:

So that all the information to resolve this issue is supplied in one place, I have provided everything that I know and think below:

Some versions of the Elitegroup L7VTA Rev. 1.0 motherboards are being supplied with Promise Technology's PDC20265R IDE RAID controller. Elitegroup supplies three of the four elements needed for a RAID controller. The motherboard and included CD have 1) Promise Technology's PDC20265R ASIC chip, 2) the latest version of the BIOS, 3) and the driver software.

However, item 4 is missing. Elitegroup says Promise Technology never supplied RAID array monitoring software for this chip. Promise Technology calls this software the "FastCheck" or the "PAM, Promise Array Management" utility. Without this software, the user cannot know if a hard drive has failed in the RAID 0 or RAID 1 or RAID 0,1 array.

This issue is Elitegroup's Case number RAE54616. (Note that Elitegroup also calls themselves "ECS".)

Elitegroup's web page for the L7VTA product is here:
http://www.ecs.com.tw/products/pd_spec.asp?product _id=327

The L7VTA V1.0 driver page is here, showing the latest Promise drivers:
http://www.ecs.com.tw/download/dw_spec.asp?product _id=63

Promise Technology's web page for on-motherboard RAID controllers is here:
http://www.promise.com/product/oem_ataraid_pdc2026 5r_eng.htm

Note that this Promise web page mentions all four elements of a

Or why not get yourself a few of those neato caddies that hold a HDD, and allow you to swap them out (internally; I am not talking about external enclosures) they are available for IDE, and the more expensive ones (claim to) allow hot swapping, even (I cannot personally verify how well the hot swap feature works or doesn't ...). I have seen them that even allow you to lock them in place with a key; how cool is that?

Much cheaper in the long run, in terms of media costs, at least for large quantities of data. Especially if you score some inexpensive smaller drives (like a surplus batch of 10 GB or so)

Hell, if you went all the way and just put an inexpensive RAID controller in there, it might pay off in the simplification of your backup procedures ... i.e. just pull a drive, and put a fresh one in, let the card rebuild it for you; backup your whole system if you like. Restoring doesn't get much easier than that, either.

Here is one made by 3ware
Here is one made by Promise
There are plenty of other, cheaper ones out there, too

Are you running that hard-drive on a promise controller? Cause they have a problem with SP3 unless you have the latest drivers. Always check driver compatibility before service packs. Hmm... somehow this thread turned into NT bugtraq itself.

Promise makes a whole line of external enclosures that are both rackmountable and desk side. They are resonably affordable. Anything from $600 and up to ~$4000

http://www.promise.com/product/product_list_eng.as p?familyId=6

Slashdotters! If you don't find a story interesting, please don't complain and call Slashdot lame. Just ignore the story. Do you complain to your local newspaper that they should not publish recipes because you don't cook?

Comment about the Slashdot question: The wording of the question seems to imply that you believe that Maxtor and Western Digital hard drives have an equal failure rate. That has not been my experience. My experience has been that Western Digital are the most reliable hard drives. I'm very interested to know the experience of other readers.

Western Digital went through a bad stretch in which they experienced a problem that caused high failure rates several years ago, but that was cured.

It's shocking that you are in the computer business and knowingly shipping products with a 4% failure rate. That's very expensive and annoys the customers.

However, you are on the right track. Electronic products have what is called "infant failure". Most failures occur in the first week. During 192 hours (one week), the failure rate falls typically by a factor of 100 or even 10,000. At the end of one week most failures have already happened.

It's very easy to write a program that exercises a hard drive. Just copy files back and forth from folder to folder. It is easy to write a program that fills a hard drive with files, then erases them and starts again.

The Promise Ultra133 TX2 supports adding four more hard drives to the 4 already supported by modern motherboards. Eight is enough for one test computer, usually, because the power supply won't support more. Be careful to use delayed start. Maybe you will need more powerful power supplies than you normally use.

Make SURE that you are not having troubles with heat. Are your drives cool when they are installed in your product? High heat will cause high failure rate.

"The first low-cost, high-performance RAID 5 host adapter with all the RAID features you want, at a price you won't believe [about $150]" was touted to work under RedHat Linux, however I have been unable to coax it to work under Gentoo or FreeBSD.

(gnashes teeth)

AMS DK-035A (ignore the Ultra SCSI reference on that page, the A suffix is for ATA), available for $159 from Central Computer

I just set up an eight drive RAID using one of those, and one 3-drive-in-2-bay version, the DK-023A ($119 from Central Computer). That way eight removable trays fit in my 5-bay 4U rack mount case.

I used a 3ware Escalade 7500-8 RAID card rather than Linux software RAID, but there's no reason why it wouldn't have worked with software RAID. I just couldn't find a "dumb" eight-port ATA-133 card. (And I like the 3ware cards.)

I initially tried to use Serial ATA, using the Promise SATA150-TX4 4-port Serial ATA controller and some Highpoint RocketHead 100 Serial ATA adapters for the drives. The Highpoint web site claims that the RocketHead 100 is not available for sale as a separate product, but lots of retailers including Central Computer seem to have them. The cabling was *much* nicer, but to make the SATA150 work with Linux a binary-only driver was required, so I decided not to use it until there's a driver available in source form.

I thought about using the 3ware Escalade 8500, which is the Serial ATA version of the 7500, but there's quite a price premium, so I decided to stick with parallel ATA for now. Maybe next year I'll set up a bigger RAID using Serial ATA.

Promise's UltraTrak series is what you are looking for.

If you are looking for external solution, Promise's UltraTrak SX4000 could be what you are looking for. 4 drives in external raid enclosure that is connected through SCSI to the computer.

They do have drivers for several distributions. Here's a link.

I was just looking at the homepage for the SuperTrak SX6000, but I'm having trouble seeing whether or not Linux is fully supported. While in the datasheet they provide, it claims Linux support, I can't really tell if that's full support including the management tools running on linux, or if they just mean it's possible to run the card under linux with the management software running remotely on a M$ box.

I was just looking at the homepage for the SuperTrak SX6000, but I'm having trouble seeing whether or not Linux is fully supported. While in the datasheet they provide, it claims Linux support, I can't really tell if that's full support including the management tools running on linux, or if they just mean it's possible to run the card under linux with the management software running remotely on a M$ box.

Jason, not sure if we're using the same promise card, but they do have the source available for the driver for my controller. I'm using it as I type with Gentoo.

I agree with you on your overall assesment of Promise though. I've had problems with this card (see elsewhere in this topic for that post). I too will probably look for a different IDE RAID vendor next time around.

HERE

I just saw this:

I'm getting one for my house with 200GB drives....they also make an 8 drive version....mmm....

-ted

We ended up going with the Promise UltraTrak SX8000, which is an external RAID cabinet that holds up to 8 IDE drives and connects up to the host computer via SCSI. We then got 8 120GB Western Digital drives for around 150$ each. The RAID set up quickly, and within an hour we had a formatted 7-drive RAID 5 array with a hotspare for if things went badly.

The cabinet has, in the 4 months since installation, given us zero problems, and worked flawlessly, with quick transfer rates, and extremely easy setup. Considering the price compared to an equivalent SCSI system, we feel that we got 90% of the value of a SCSI system (the only difference being that IDE drives break sooner than SCSI drives, and that SCSI drives are moderately faster, both of which weren't quite necessary for us.)

If your system contains mission-critical data, go the more expensive route and get a full SCSI raid system with multiple hotspares and pay a guy to sit in a corner and maintain it. If, like us, you just need a large amount of very-reliable storage without much hassle, go the IDE RAID route. It's working great for us.

$50? For $20, I got a Promise ATA/100 card, which has functioned without a hitch for six months for me so far.

Now, those 28 drives will need to be attached to something. Maybe an Adaptec SCSI RAID 5400S, which is a four channel card that can accept up to 60 drives and is priced at about $900. Add to that a machine to put the RAID card in with at least GB ethernet, at around $6000, 3 40U racks at $2000 each and a UPS for each rack at $2500 each.

All told, that's $67,200 each for drives and arrays, $900 for the SCSI RAID, $6000 for a single box, $6000 for racks, $7500 for UPS's, at a sum total of $154,800 for a single 50TB array. Primary point of failure is the single box running it. For a backup system, running a full second array as redundancy would cost a net $309,600. All of this is not inclusive of labor, which for setup might run easily $100k. Thus, a redundant reliable RAID solution would run you $400,000. All that's once the 320GB IDE drive is released by maxtor.

Does that answer your question?

Please note, this won't be the best array money can buy, just a large array on the cheap. (what RAID was intended for)

Does anyone know of a product like this?

Yes, but you won't like the price generally, for the real plug and play units.

ACNC

Makes external boxes that you hook to a normal SCSI controller card, comes in the form of boxes that can take ATA drives, or SCSI drives. Also makes fibre channel boxes of a similar nature. Appears as one large SCSI drive to the host OS, compatible with basically any OS.

HardData

Same deal as ACNC basically, but is more of a VAR of AXUS products of this type. Penguin on homepage a plus.

Promise

Low end crappy standalone ATA-to-SCSI boxes, similar to the above ones, also makes very crappy contoller cards, only useful if you are using them for software RAID, don't use thier hardware RAID for anything. Promise cards are also picky about the BIOS on the motherboard they are installed on. Their standalone box prices are way overpriced for what you get. Their controller cards are cheap, but acceptable, for software RAID. More than one 6 channel controller per computer is not supported, more than three two channel cards is not supported. Linux kernel module is mature though.

3ware

3ware makes hardware ATA RAID controllers that are very fast, and relatively expensive. "Unlimited" number of controllers per computer, I've ran up to four 8-port cards in a single computer. Cabling is a mess when you get a lot of drives in a single system, if you need that many, seriously consider one of the above standalone boxes. Linux kernel module is open source and vendor maintained. Management software for Linux is free but closed source.

-----------------
Of course, Linux has software RAID built right in, and with a distro like Red Hat, you can set up software RAID when you install the OS in a simple GUI. You can use whatever disks you have installed, but for good results, you need to only have one disk per ATA channel, be it on your motherboard or a Promise card.

I'm in the market for a new machine, and I've been spec'ing out different parts for my budget...These drives are nice and big, but what happens when you lose a 120 gig drive...I've pretty much decided that I'm going to have to get an IDE RAID card and highly recommend them...the RAID cards at work have saved me hours and hours of restoring from backup...Check out the 3ware Escalade, the Promise SuperTrak, or the Adaptec 2400A. RAID 5 is the way to go (with or without removable drives). I've been watching the prices for 120 Gig drives drop and now it's just about the price where I can afford to spend 150 clams to buy an extra drive that would be used to protect myself from a drive failure.

- grunby

The following pages provide information about ATA RAID and hot swapping:

• Adaptec 2400A - FAQ

  It supports online capacity expansion, hot-spare and hot-swap (chassis required), and all major operating systems.

• 3Ware 7500-series controller - Datasheet
• 3Ware ATA Drive Cage - Product Specs
• Promise SuperTrack SX6000 - Datasheet

Well this seems to be as good a place as any to ask this question. Has anyone out there tried one of those SCSI -> IDE RAID arrays? I only know of a couple of companies making them:
Promise UltraTrak series
ACS-8xxx

Anybody know how well these things work?

The other thing I like about these is that since they have a SCSI interface to the array you could get a SCSI RAID card and RAID the RAID arrays. Not sure what that would do but it would be fun trying it.

This story hits far too close to home as I just spent the last two evenings attempting to install my Promise ATA/133 card, along with my new Maxtor 160gb drive.. and a new install of Windows. Although I had the most recent drivers, and specified them on install, Windows XPlod could not manage to complete an installation without a hard freeze, blue screen, or other nonsense. I tried with Linux, but only managed to lose my MP3 collection on my other drive.

Personally I think that ATA133's biggest advantage is the support for drives over 137GB. The speed constraint is a secondary advantage.

Most IDE drive trays are NOT rated for hot swap, and neither are the controllers on the motherboard. To do ide hotswap the best way is an ide raid controller from either 3ware, Promise or Adaptec along with certified disk trays.

Would be to replace the 4 controllers, and the monster case. Use a more "standard" chassis. Slap a regular SCSI card in it. And then for the drives themselves, use an UltraTrak100 TX8
to hold the drives.

It just seems like a far cleaner solution. Not to mention FAR more expandable. And works out to be about the same price.

The requirements specify 4 PCI RAID controllers. Each of these could potentially handle 4 hard drives. I'm assuming that he's only putting 2 on each so that it doesn't come across the problem of accessing 2 drives on the same channel. In addition to this, there are 2 more on the motherboard, that I guess he isn't using. Secondly, these cards are bootable. So any one of them can be set to boot from and you can boot from any drive. But I don't think he is doing that because he has an additional 20 gig drive that I'm assuming is going on the motherboard. That is where the OS is going to be installed.

Go here for the datasheet

I believe that Promise makes the SuperTRAK Pro series of ATA RAID cards that support up to 6 drives and RAID 5. I haven't used them personally but they do exist.

I agree that on a server or a professional workstation SCSI is the way to go for speed and reliability. But for the home consumer who wants to work with digital video the cost of a SCSI RAID set up is extremely prohibitive.

On the Promise side, the SuperTrak SX6000 is their hardware ATA RAID solution (the PDF datasheet can be found here. The older version of the SuperTrack SX6000, the S/T66, is also a hardware ATA RAID controller. The FastTrak series are their soft-RAID controller series.

I'm personally looking at the 3Ware offerings (as the FreeBSD 4.x kernel has support for it, I believe in the default kernel) and possibly the Adaptec 2400A.

Does anyone have any thoughts about IDE raid, especially the offerings from Promise Technology? They've got cards that do RAID 5 with regular IDE drives, including hot failover capability. They've also got subsystems that put a full 8 disks into a RAID array, but presents it to the controller as a single SCSI device.

Advantages: Cheap drives.
Disadvantages: Speed, maybe, though since it's all going directly into the PCI bus, I'm not sure this is an issue.

Anyone used these? Comments? I figure with their SuperTrax controller and a bunch of 80 or 100-G drives, you could have half a terabyte in your basement for under two grand.

Hi nice to meet you. I'm a sysadmin at a community college. Not that high a budget, y'know? Still, we use at least 10k scsi drives in everything we can, 15k for the ones that matter.
We make Good Use of these drives and if they were any slower i would be getting way way too many phone calls.

If you look at Dell's offerings (we buy a lot of dells here) in the server range, it's tough to find something that doesn't come with 10k scsi drives. I think their 350 is the only one that comes with IDE drives.
Going over to Sun's lineup, you'll see that their low-end desktop machines like their SunBlade 100 now have IDE drives in them but everything else has at least 10k scsi or fc drives.

I know plenty of people who run servers off of pc, IDE based hardware, but most of these are either personal sites of fellow geeks. My home mass storage unit has one of those nifty Promise FastTrack100 IDE RAID cards, but that's b/c i can't afford SCSI and the storage is only used by me (well, my friends too when they download my movies/mp3s, but scp'ing via my home net connection will in no way hammer the storage unit). Most server rooms i've been to have the dells or similar equipment with SCSI in them, even the really shitty server rooms with really shitty boxes, those people still use scsi cards & drives.

Of course you're right about cost and use, but in most environments it is essential to plan for the future. Buying more or faster disk than we currently need might seem silly now but sometimes growth occurs inversely proportionate to budget - i'm already regretting not having taken larger bites when i could of b/c some of our servers are becoming seriously underpowered and i dont know if our current budget will let us purchase what we need (but i bet i coulda swung for more when i first bought the server in question).

Promise IDE RAID controllers saved my live more than once. Three 100GB drives in a RAID 5 config still leaves with you just under 200GB and a safety net.

You'll be lucky if the BIOS on that 486 can see beyond 4GB on an IDE drive.

FYI, I haven't seen anything on their site regarding them dropping the cards, but at the same time they aren't providing any information for them either... they are merely giving you a phone number to call or an email address to write if you have any inquiries.

My bet is that they are not providing them any more and are concentrating on their IP products.

Personally, I use Promise SuperTrakSX 6000 IDE RAID cards. They work quite well, and offer just about any RAID config you want to use with IDE drives. They also support hot-swappable IDE drives, but require a special drive bay in order to protect electronic components from frying (motherboards, controller cards, drives, etc.).

FYI, I haven't seen anything on their site regarding them dropping the cards, but at the same time they aren't providing any information for them either... they are merely giving you a phone number to call or an email address to write if you have any inquiries.

My bet is that they are not providing them any more and are concentrating on their IP products.

Personally, I use Promise SuperTrakSX 6000 IDE RAID cards. They work quite well, and offer just about any RAID config you want to use with IDE drives. They also support hot-swappable IDE drives, but require a special drive bay in order to protect electronic components from frying (motherboards, controller cards, drives, etc.).

There are at least 2 IDE cards that do hardware RAID. Adaptec AAA-UDMA and Promise Supertrak

Anandtech did a review of 5 different RAID cards (3 software and 2 hardware) in June. http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.html?i=14 91&p=1. The performance was disapointing (at least to me) but now you can't say that you haven't seen a IDE card do raid 5 in hardware ;)

Have you tried 3ware? They make IDE RAID cards that have linux driver support (in the 2.4 kernel). I'm not sure if their devices support the new 48bit LBA standard. They seem to be focusing more on their larger products but their RAID cards (which are used in their larger products so they shouldn't be going away any time soon) are here.

Promise has the FastTrak100 TX4 PCI that supposedly has four independent IDE channels (no slave/master crap, everything is master like 3ware products) so you have another option there with support for 48bit LBA in Promise drivers mentioned at linux-ide.org it sounds like a promising solution (no pun intended).

You could always put a couple Promise Ultra100's in there too - it sucks to waste PCI slots but with high end motherboards having onboard LAN, sound, etc I would expect that you have plenty of open slots. I've used both Promise Ultra/FastTrack products (with the kernel drivers, not Promises) and 3ware products and both are great.

From front page of linux-ide.org:
Leading the World to Announce Native 48bit LBA Support
Supporting Maxtor BIG DRIVE TECHNOLOGY
Releasing Support of new Promise Ultra 133 TX2 48bit HOST
Future Release Support of new Silicon Image's CMD 48bit HOST

...but Promise Technology makes a network-attached storage device that uses ATA drives instead of SCSI. They also make an interesting external storage subsystem which uses ATA drives, but is SCSI-attached. I may get one of those myself and fill it full of IBM Deskstar 60GXP goodness.

I know that at least one motherboard manufacturer (Iwill) has onboard ATA RAID on some of its more recent boards (according to Maximum PC magazine's August 2001 issue, the KK266-R for Athlons with PC100/133 SDRAM, last I heard it was selling for $110). Do not know anything about usability of this device in various operating systems though. You'd think it would be implemented in hardware, so the OS just sees one disk device that represents the mirrorset, but I wouldn't swear to anything...

No, I don't work for Promise or Iwill, or any of their suppliers or business partners.

...but Promise Technology makes a network-attached storage device that uses ATA drives instead of SCSI. They also make an interesting external storage subsystem which uses ATA drives, but is SCSI-attached. I may get one of those myself and fill it full of IBM Deskstar 60GXP goodness.

I know that at least one motherboard manufacturer (Iwill) has onboard ATA RAID on some of its more recent boards (according to Maximum PC magazine's August 2001 issue, the KK266-R for Athlons with PC100/133 SDRAM, last I heard it was selling for $110). Do not know anything about usability of this device in various operating systems though. You'd think it would be implemented in hardware, so the OS just sees one disk device that represents the mirrorset, but I wouldn't swear to anything...

No, I don't work for Promise or Iwill, or any of their suppliers or business partners.

Get a motherboard with 4 IDE channels (most "raid versions" have this) and plug 12 drives into the Hotrods, 4 into the motherboard's raid channels, and 2 into the secondary ide channel. The boot hard drive goes on the primary ide channel.

Ouch! Spend a few hundred more, and get an Escalade Storage Switch. They perform very well and aren't wildly expensive (you should be able to have an 8-channel 32-bit, 33Mhz version for under $500.00). You also have your motherboard IDE channels free for things like DVD-ROM drives... heh heh... Lots of DVD-ROM drives... Heh heh...

Ahh, yes-- and there are Linux drivers available for the Escalade controllers. If you're looking for wild amounts of performance, they do have a 66Mhz, 64-bit PCI version available, too. Wowza.

Promise has their SuperTrak controller, which looks very interesting, but based on some messages I saw flying around on the Kernel List, apparently it's not as straightforward as just compiling in I2O support to use it under Linux. Grrr...

Check out this review and this review if you want to see how the Escalade stacked up to other "high end" IDE RAID controllers.

Why bother with a shim when you can get an Adaptec UDMA/66 RAID (AAA-UDMA) card or a Promise SuperTrak 100 RAID card and handle the storage natively? Both products have been available for a little while and are past version 1 drivers, so they should be fairly stable. Both products will do RAID 5 with 8 or so drives (4 controllers, 2 drives each). At 8 80GB drives in a RAID 5 configuration with one hot-spare, you wind up with 480G of safe storage. Put two cards in a system and you're almost at the terabyte mark. I've used many Promise FastTrak cards in small servers to mirror the data drives, and I've never had one card fail yet. (I did have a drive go bad and the product worked as advertised...) I wouldn't bother with a SCSI solution unless you're going with SCSI drives. As usual, use the right technology for the job.

Well, it seem these days, most of the power user just care to get something like 200fps in Quake III. Why ? Beat's me ! I'm not on a quest to get the ultimate frame rate, I just want my box to be quiet as possibly can be.

To help you understand my take on the subject, here is the background :
My PC has the following components :

• A OEM case
• A 235W OEM power supply
• ASUS P3B-F
• Intel Pentium II rated 400Mhz @ 400Mhz
• A cheap OEM SECC2 Heat-Sink made of aluminum
• A 128MB CAS2 no-name DIMM
• Two 32MB CAS3 Samsung DIMM slowing down my memory timing, but preventing the appearance of the all mighty evil SwaP
• A ATI All-In-Wonder Rage128 16MB
• A Creative SoundBlaster Live! Value
• A Realtek 8139 Ethernet NIC
• My beloved USR 56Kbps ISA Real Modem. Sorry but to me a component that uses CPU power to do it's processing instead of taking the load off is not worthy of being in my computer. Not to mention the M$ Win part...
• A Creative 48x CD-ROM drive. It's the loudest damned thing in my computer when it's spinning
• A Quantum Fireball AS PLUS 40GB (7200RPM) in a removable tray
• A Quantum Fireball CX1 10GB (5400RPM) mounted inside the case
• Of course the stupid old 1.44 MB floppy drive only used for booting Tomsbrt in case of emergency

Soon to be :

• A Adaptec 2940UW
• A Diamond Monster 3D II for Glide games

It turn out that the Quantum Fireball AS makes less noise than the Quantum Fireball CX1. I still have to figure it out ...

I use my PC for :

• Running Linux and learning as much as time allows me (Jez I had so much time when I was a student... Think of all the time I wasted in High-School running the evil W monster)
• Doing some gaming i.e. : Diablo II, Unreal, UT, Undying (Although that thing is going to cost me a new box)
• Spending numerous nights filling my brain @ Slashdot, Tomshardware, Anandtech, Arstechnica, StorageReview, Developper.Intel.com, and most importantly, hounding the web for all the case manufacturers and their take at a quiet box.

As I'm writing this post, that is probably going to be the base documentation for my Silent Case Project, you're guessing that my sleepless night of browsing have not yielded the desired result.

I've check out many options such as water cooling, moving the PC to the closet, returning to the forest where a PC is pretty far from your everyday quest for survival. None of them suits me.

The objective of my project is to build a case that meets the following criteria :

• A silent as possible
• Accessible
• Provides sufficient ventilation to maintain all the components running within thermal specs
• Be light enough to be easily transportable (Let's not forget the Lan parties ;-)

To attain those goals I have to :

• Read all I can about noise, sound, aerodynamics, PC specs
• Find suitable materials : A case is not just a protection against unwanted fingers and dust ; it must provide EMI shielding, proper grounding, resist to impacts, and fit into my conception of the king of object you want in your bedroom (If you were thinking about plywood and a box of rusted leftover nails, forget it)
• Find the tools or the companies or individuals with the means to work the materials I choose to build the casing

For the sound isolation I was thinking about some kind of foam. Mineral lint would be affective but that takes too much space and it's not the kind of thing I want beside my bed. Form the casing itself, metal is almost inevitable if you want EMI shielding and grounding. And as for you who wonder why I have not mentioned water cooling yet, the greatest source of noise is not my CPU cooler and your just moving the problem out of the case (Nice ; you have water heating up but unless your reservoir is like a bathtub or something you will have to transfer the heat for the water to the air).

That about as far as I am. If you have any idea that might help me, please fell free to send me some bits forming ASCII characters at Prozzaks@operamail.com

To finish up, here is a list of thing that might help people wanting to achieve similar goals :

• http://www.formfactors.org/ You should be able to find all the documents regarding the ATX form factor and thermal design guides. A must if you want to build a quiet PC.
• http://developer.intel.com/ Intel has contributed a great deal to the ATX definition ; here you will find many relevant documents including thermal design guides for all Intel processors.
• Etract from my favorite's :
  
  

  Hardware\cases PC CASE
  Fong Kai
  PowerOn
  Enlight Corporation
  dir.yahoo Enclosures Manufacturers
  procase
  YY Computer
  Psi
  IN WIN
  Amtrade
  American Suntek
  Addtronics
  A-Top Technology, Inc
  Nikao
  Palo Alto Products
  Antec
  Lian-Li
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In NT4 however, on a clean install according to http://www.promise.com/tech support/Install/U66_NT40.htm, NT4 informs me that the device isn't in my system, despite the fact that I had just done some partitioning on the HD on that controller in DOS previously... hmm how about I install NT on a normal ide channel then add the Ultra66 driver? Ok.
http://www.promise.com /techsupport/Install/u66_exisiting.htm steps me through it. When I add the driver in the SCSI Adapters part in control panel, power down, insert card, and reboot, NTDetect locks up tighter than a virgin at bible camp. Whoops.
NT4 hasn't been able to run on it to this day, while Linux is flying along running my home network's file server with this controller, on the same hardware that stops NT cold in its tracks.

In NT4 however, on a clean install according to http://www.promise.com/tech support/Install/U66_NT40.htm, NT4 informs me that the device isn't in my system, despite the fact that I had just done some partitioning on the HD on that controller in DOS previously... hmm how about I install NT on a normal ide channel then add the Ultra66 driver? Ok.
http://www.promise.com /techsupport/Install/u66_exisiting.htm steps me through it. When I add the driver in the SCSI Adapters part in control panel, power down, insert card, and reboot, NTDetect locks up tighter than a virgin at bible camp. Whoops.
NT4 hasn't been able to run on it to this day, while Linux is flying along running my home network's file server with this controller, on the same hardware that stops NT cold in its tracks.

The BP6 uses a Hotpoint controller for ATA66. Abit also sells these separately, called Hotrod, I think.

Promise also makes ATA66 controllers, among them IDE RAID (!).

Linux support? No idea... :-(

-

Promise Technologyy ( http://www.promise.com) makes a Raid controller for Ultra DMA drives. I've been looking at these for a while, but just haven't had a good enough reason to go out and buy one. Not yet, at least. (I was planning on getting one for my _next_ computer.) It seems like a great way to get a lot of performance out of cheap drives. I think it is all done "in the hardware" -- it looks like a single drive to the os and so It _should_ work with linux, but don't quote me on that one.

The price is good, about $125 (US), and four Ultra DMA drives to fill this up would be much, much less expensive than four equivalent SCSI drives. Granted, an uIDE Raid array will be different than SCSI-based array, but it should be close enough for a meaningful compairison, I think.

Has anyone used uDAM Raids? Heard Any reviews?

Promise (and most likely, other companies,) makes a port expander card. This is an older card, but still does the job. EIDE compatible, no UDMA on this one. This will give you 4 IDE channels (most modern motherboards have 2 built in, this gives you an ADDITIONAL 2 channels.) It can be found here. Note: This is an ISA card.

Promise also makes their Ultra33 expander card. This card supports UDMA33, and once again, adds an additional 2 channels. It can be found here. Note: This is a PCI card.

For those who really want speed, once again, Promise comes through with their Ultra66 expander card. This card supports UDMA66, and, like their previous cards, adds 2 channels, leaving your original 2 free for other devices (or more hard drives). It can be found here. Note: This is a PCI card.

By giving your machine 4 IDE channels, you will have the option of connecting up to 8 IDE devices, including hard drives, cd-rom drives, and the like. You should (if I'm thinking correctly..) be able to read/write from 4 of these devices simultaneously (one device from each channel). This is probably what the HOWTO or whatever is talking about (needing 3 controllers/channels/whatever). Accessing 2 devices on the same channel will be somewhat slower.

Promise (and most likely, other companies,) makes a port expander card. This is an older card, but still does the job. EIDE compatible, no UDMA on this one. This will give you 4 IDE channels (most modern motherboards have 2 built in, this gives you an ADDITIONAL 2 channels.) It can be found here. Note: This is an ISA card.

Promise also makes their Ultra33 expander card. This card supports UDMA33, and once again, adds an additional 2 channels. It can be found here. Note: This is a PCI card.

For those who really want speed, once again, Promise comes through with their Ultra66 expander card. This card supports UDMA66, and, like their previous cards, adds 2 channels, leaving your original 2 free for other devices (or more hard drives). It can be found here. Note: This is a PCI card.

By giving your machine 4 IDE channels, you will have the option of connecting up to 8 IDE devices, including hard drives, cd-rom drives, and the like. You should (if I'm thinking correctly..) be able to read/write from 4 of these devices simultaneously (one device from each channel). This is probably what the HOWTO or whatever is talking about (needing 3 controllers/channels/whatever). Accessing 2 devices on the same channel will be somewhat slower.