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Promote Your ATA66 Controller To A RAID Controller
SPI3LB3RG writes "
Evidentally he only differences between the Promise ATA66
Controller and the Promise FastTrack66 RAID Controller (beside cosmetic) are a
five-cent resistor and the bios. The page tells how to change the
ATA66 to a RAID controller. (A simple bios flash and some soldering.) In the end, you have a $65 RAID controller for about $20 bucks."
Current price at buy.com on the Promise ATA66 Controller is USD 34.94, and the FastTrack66 RAID Controller is USD 123.95; at pricewatch lowest prices shown are USD 27.00 and USD 113.00 respectively.
If I were to wash a plastic spoon, would you call me a thief? How about if I used a salad fork for other things rather than buying a complete set as the manufacturer anticipates? They sold a card that can be modified to be a raid controller. The day that we view resourcefullness os a crime will be a sad day indeed. Regardless of the motivations of your post, you are an imbiscle.
I worked for a cdrom manufacturer a few years ago. They had two cdroms at different speeds. All that was required for the higher speed was a smt jumper. I bet that there's a few others with products that are similar in a line that require a minimum of effort to upgrade. Of course there's always a few hackers around who will spot stuff like that. Somebody needs to start a list.....
The idea was not that the tail was sacrificed for the energy requirements, but because it would free up brain cells for other functions.
Die jämmerlichen Versuche von euch Amis eine etwas komplexere Sprache wie Deutsch in den Griff zu bekommen sind jedes Mal aufs neue unterhaltsam.
Entweder man kann es, oder man läßt es bleiben. Im Fall der obigen Nachricht würde ich dringend die zweite Möglichkeit empfehlen - der Text ist nicht nur für englischsprachige Leser unverständlich.
Yeah it works - I wouldn't have posted it to HardOCP if it didn't ... It just does the same job as the pull down SMB resistor without the advantage that you have to pull the bios chip out which would not be fun if your not good with an iron, solder sucker and braid. Jim.
The only difference between a Celeron 266 and a 500 are about 3.5 million transistors, grab your iron!!
If you want to INSTALL linux on an drive attached to an Ultra66 the driver installation is not a SNAP.
Also the driver is BETA, but hey it's your job....
I personally always thought it would be cool to have thumbs on each side of my hands. You know, so your hands would be symmetrical? It would do away with that weak point when holding anything like a knife, shovel handle, etc. and would allow some neat three-way grips on things with only one hand, and if you think about it, it wouldn't have to get in the way any more than your existing thumbs do.
Bottlenecking on one drive will eliminate the speed advantage of the RAID altogether... I think RAID 1 is much faster than RAID 5 but if I can't hot-swap and recover under this config I will literally get my ass throw out the door if the RAID goes down. We have no budget for anything that could back up a 1.2 TB system on a regular basis (hospitals are cheap). So, I have to make something faster, larger, and more stable out of nothing, wih complete recovery and full speed advantage.
Want my job?
Quite soon probably. Modems kept changing when people figured out how to force update them years ago :)
Ich wirklich denke nicht daß deutsche Stoffe groß, weil die meisten revelent Fällen in der Welt in den US geschehen.
Ein Land ohne eine militärische Struktur ist im Allgemeinen unbrauchbar.
Found about this this weekend, after just getting my fasttrak/66 raid controller. Damn was I pissed for not waiting.
The lengths people will go to "save money" amazes me still to this day.
Why is it that people can't see that saving $40 by spending a couple hours messing with this thing isn't worth it?? If you make any reasonable amount of money, the time spent doing it could've been spent making more than enough to just buy the damn thing.
I can understand curiosity and wanting to see how things work. However, I know a few people who do things like this constantly because they honestly believe it saves them money.
News Flash:
If you are paid $10 an hour for your normal job (pretty low for tech!), and you "save" $50 by spending 10 hours messing with hardware, you have just in effect spent $50 more than you would have. You could have just gone to work for 5 hours and made the money. [of course taxes take effect too, but still not much time needed]
Also, for the same people: spending 5 hours searching for the pirated version of a $50 piece of software, and then spending 30 minutes or so messing with it and trying to get it to work, and then burning it onto a $1 CD has just cost you at least what you would've spent by just buying the damn thing, if not more. That and you don't have any sort of warranty or tech support, and you can't even know if the software is virus-free or if it will erase your hard drive just because some 'l33t w4r3z d00d' thought it would be funny.
Anyways, I conclude with the following:
People are stupid.
Now no matter what I did, I could only get 3 out of the four drives working. Everytime, I placed a second drive (didn't matter if it was on the Ultra66 primary or secondary controller), I couldn't boot to the computer.
I believe that the solution would be to fdisk all drives and start over. Not what I wanted to do.
I gave up at this point. BTW don't put CD-roms on the same controller as your harddrives. CDroms run in mode0 or mode 1 which forces your harddrive to run in the same mode. Mode 4 gives 16 mByte/sec transfer. Mode 0 is much slower.
Use a separate controller for your cdrom, I put it on my soundcard and set the irq to 11.
I think the better analogy would be taking NT Workstation and changing the registry to make it NT Server. I had heard of using a program called NTTune to perform these changes, but without that program, here are the instructions (reprinted without permision)...
o l/ProductOptions/
o l/ProductOptions/Produ
o l/PorductOptions/
o l/ProductOptions/
The following is how to trick NT4 to make NTW = NTS by
changing the Registry settings.
FYI the worker threads that guard the Registry settings
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/SYSTEM/Setup/SystemPrefix and
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/SYSTEM/CurrentControlSet/Contr
ProductType do take changes back immmediatly after you make them.
Further the thread that guards the ProductType setting issues a
warning if anything is changed in the ProductOptions section.
For testing purposes do the following to make my NT4
Workstation 'behave' like an NT4 Server:
1) Write down the following settings in your Registry:
(values for my PC in parentheses)
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/SYSTEM/Setup/SystemPrefix: (REG_BINARY:
D71B0000000032D8)
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/SYSTEM/CurrentControlSet/Contr
ctType: (REG_SZ: WinNT)
2) Make a copy of each entry as:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/SYSTEM/Setup/SxstemPrefiy: (REG_BINARY:
D71B0000000032D8)
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/SYSTEM/CurrentControlSet/Contr
Type: (REG_SZ: WinNT)
(Notice the exchange of 'x' and 'y' in "SxstemPrefiy" and 'o' and
'r' in "PorductType"!)
3) go to directory %SystemRoot%\System32, copy ntoskrnl.exe to
ntoskrnl.pat
4) Patch ntoskrnl.pat in the following locations (offsets) to reflect
the above changes:
exchange 0x053088 and 0x05309C ('SxstemPrefiy') exchange
0x052F16 and 0x052F18 ('PorductOptions') exchange 0x0BEB2E and
0x0BEB42 ('SxstemPrefiy') exchange 0x0BEBB0 and 0x0BEBB2
('ProductOptions')
(the *exchanging* is necessary to make the NTOSKRNL.EXE not to
appear corrupt, so the checksum does match)
5) rename ntoskrnl.exe to ntoskrnl.org (it is in use by the system, so
you can only rename it)
6) rename ntoskrnl.pat to ntoskrnl.exe (this is to boot with our
patched version)
7) shut down and reboot your system Notice: if your system is on a
NTFS partition, be sure to have a second 'Maintainance NT' installed
to undo the above changes in case of a failure.
8) After rebooting, make the following changes to the registry (notice
the guard thread watches
'SxstemPrefix' and 'PorductOptions' now):
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/SYSTEM/Setup/SystemPrefix: (REG_BINARY:
D71B0000000032DC) "change D8 to DC!]
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/SYSTEM/CurrentControlSet/Contr
ProductType: (REG_SZ: ServerNT)
9) go to %SystemRoot%\System32, rename ntoskrnl.exe to ntoskrnl.pat
and rename ntoskrnl.org to
ntoskrnl.exe.
10) Shut down and reboot. You should see no logon screen during login
but now you have an NT Server.
The author of the page removed his email and contact information, so I will assume that he did not want to attract too much attention to himself. How is this any different? Is this wrong too? I wouldn't trust this to run a commercial site, nor would I trust the Promise conversion, but this is a much better analogy than the car.
Good luck (with the RAID upgrade and with keeping your job). This solution differs from software RAID in only a few ways: there's a card sticking in the box to provide Ultra/66 speeds for the IDE bus and... thats it. You can get the exact same RAID configuration for free and not have to solder any cards or have to worry about a card being supported by Linux by using the software RAID that is in Linux. Both options use the CPU for most of the RAID functions. I also don't see any option to do RAID 5 with this card. Just buy yourself a motherboard that supports Ultra/66 and run Linux soft RAID - I don't see the point in potentially compromising the integrity of your data to save a few measly dollars. If you worked for me and I found out about this, you and I would have a little chat about this "cost-cutting" measure and I might cut costs by firing you.
The Arena enclosures are crap. We have two of them at work. They both died. One took an SGI Onyx with it. And for all of the chest thumping the SCSI people do, they are pretty slow. I have a Software RAID Linux box with UDMA66 drives that runs rings around the Arenas. Oh, and watching FSCK run on that Arena was painful. 100 GBs took almost two hours! Caveat emptor!
*shrug* you gotta start somewhere.
We run 2 ARENA setups and never had any problems with them. One HD in one enclosure was acting up and was replaced withour any down time. While the standars arena w/ the 486 processor is a bit on the slow side I must say that fsck on it is no slower than ona mashine we have with 7 18GB drives mounted each separatly. Fsck on those drive is upwards 3 hours. The EX version with the LVD option is noticably faster and I would recomend the upgrade.
Read this slowly so you can understand it. The board is yours. Modifying it is fine. The BIOS code is not yours. You didn't pay the license fee for it. They didn't release it as free code. Using it is theft.
It is pretty sad that you think that following somebody's posted step-by-step instructions is resourceful. Maybe you can find a copy of IP Theft for Dummies at your High School Library. Hmm, here's an idea. Run make against some downloaded source, then you can claim to be a programmer, too.
hate to tell you this but its not a controller problem. The problem is a nice little program given you by the kind folks at gateway called ez-drive. a drive manager blindly installed on all gateway pc's. makes the drive useless without a fdisk /mbr followed by an fdisk, follwed by a format. i spent days with this before i discovered the source of the problem.
Also, they didn't give you a copy. They put it in a public place. You still had to download a copy. Without them putting up a license agreement you don't have the right to do anything with their code. The default ownership including use rights is still theirs unless they say otherwise.
The ease of theft argument is kind of like saying it isn't robbery if I rob your house when you don't lock the door.
That's exactly what happened to me one time when i first started bout 10 years ago..... but i burnt both my hand and the carpet........
..."cost-cutting" measure and I might cut costs by firing you. Um, ok. That's probably a true thing. "Both options use the CPU..." That is an INCORRECT statement. The function of a RAID unit (card, etc), is that IT and not the CPU will handle the XOR and storing/retrieving data. Where do you get your knowledge? The "Cost-Cutters School of Technology", where, I might add, the cost is low, but they skimp on common sense fundamentals like RAID. Please, without looking it up, tell us all what RAID means, my friend? I'm sure if you're honest, you'd probably have to admit that YOU DON'T KNOW. Thx
RAID 1 does not have striping. You may be using shorthand for RAID 1+0 or RAID 0+1 but RAID 1 in and of itself only does mirroring.
For the newbie's:
RAID 0 = striping OR concatenation
RAID 1 = mirroring
RAID 0+1 = mirrored stripes
RAID 1+0 = striped mirrors
RAID 3 = striping + parity (dedicated parity disk)
RAID 5 = striping + parity (distributed parity)
Thus endeth the lesson. Go in peace.
You don't need to unsolder anything. Click here for a simpler mod which accomplishes the same thing.
A dingo ate your baby.
Wow, some useful information and still a troll at the same time! Good job!
RAID is Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks. It is an alternative to SLED. SLED being Single Large Expensive Disk. See, back in the old days when soldering irons were iron pulled from a fire, making a 100G drive was really hard and expensive. But getting a few 20G drives was doable, and thus inexpensive. RAID is about creating a capacity, thats how RAID 0 got grouped in there even though it is not redundant at all. Compare the cost of a 200G capacity 1,000,000 hour MTBF in a single drive verse a RAID solution?
If only this were a true RAID controller that could do RAID-5 there would be something to get excited about. Would be cool to take 4 UDMA 66 drives and do 3+1 RAID 5, 3x the storage capacity, greater transfer rate than a single drive, and data protection. But alas, RAID 0 and 1 only.
"I am not too hot on the idea of applying heat to a card."
What kind of a geek are you that you can't solder? Really I thought my soldering prowress was genetic, like the rest of my geekness. Soldering is one of the ultimate geek rites of passage. The first time I saw molten solder I knew it was destiny at work.
How do you think the rest of the parts got soldered onto the card, magic? Sure a crappy solderer can ruin the board itself with excessive heat, the trace can be lifted off the phenolic surface. Here's the rule though, 10 seconds at 600 degrees fahrenheit. Components are usually rated to take that. Really the whole board passed over a waterfall of solder during manufacturing, a machine called a wave solder machine put all the non surface mount components on it.
Here's a few more tips for professional soldering results. Clean, clean, CLEAN! Work clean. Brighten the pads with 3M scotchbright (don't use steelwool you dork broken pieces of the steelwool can get caught in the flux you didn't remove properly and short out the board! (OK you don't have Scotchbright I hear a pencil eraser can work too, just get all the erasor rubbings out of there before trying to solder)) before attempting to solder to them (pads are them places on the board components go to). Also brighten the leads on the component, (no, an erasor probably isn't going to work on the component leads you can use steel wool but don't do it over the board. And when i say steelwool I don't mean your mother's S.O.S. pads under the sink either, they have soap on them Although she might have that natural sponge you'll need to wipe your iron tip on by natural sponge I don't mean one of them coral reef sponges though they might work too you can't use a synthetic sponge the iron will melt it you want one of those sponges that get hard as a rock when they dry) often component leads have a slight oxidation from laying around, you might not see it, but brightened parts solder much faster, really you can't solder oxide. Have a moistened natural sponge (celluoce?) to wipe the tip of the iron on before applying it to the joint.
You did tin the tip of your iron correctly didn't you? I have a whole ritual I go through with a new tip. Basically it's like this, I dip the cold tip in rosin flux (not too much ) then wrap solder around the tip (oh yeah all this is while the iron is cold) Then turn the iron on, and wait for the big drip! (do this over the sponge molten solder is dangerious) Now wipe off excess on your moistened natural sponge, roll the tip on the sponge.
Here's my practice before making a joint, dip the hot iron tip in rosin flux (a quick stab) then sponge it roll the tip on the sponge quickly). If there's black crap on the tip it's time to clean the tip. Black crap sucks! (real bad black crap on the tip requires light sanding and retinning the tip this is advice for all of you who happen to have found an old iron laying around that's been used by someone who didn't know what they were doing with a soldering iron) Soldering guns suck too (I had to say it). Yeah now might be a good time to say a few words on the right iron. I got a great iron off of Jameco, it's an adjustable heat pencil for like $30. You don't want one of them dorky guns! A 30 watt pencil tip is fine for most electronics. The only thing that really sucks about a Radio Hut $3.98 gun is the fact that the tip eventually welds itself to the heating element. For a one shot deal they're fine though if properly tinned before use. Also those new butane irons are awful nice, and you can use the exhaust to shrink heatshrink tubing. (man I'm a geek)
Apply a SMALL amount of rosin to the joint before applying heat. Use something like a toothpick (I use one of my tiny jeweler's screwdrivers. Every geek has a set of jeweler's screwdrivers right?) Place the iron tip on the pad not the component, and apply the solder to the pad not the iron tip. (you can "wet" the tip a bit to allow faster heat transfer but applying solder to the tip of the iron the solder just tends to want to stay on the tip) Let it wick! If you're really uncomfortable with your soldering technique you might want to heatsink the component before attempting to solder it. By heatsink the component I mean use heatsinks on the legs of the device. Small alligator clips on the legs between the component and the pad, should protect it. If you solder correctly you won't need to do this. Also, let the component stand above the board a bit, don't ram it as far as you can down onto the board.
One last thing, after you have sucessfully soldered the component to the board remove the excess flux! The flux is a semi conductor itself. They make professional products to deflux boards but in a pinch rubbing alcohol will work. While you're at Radio Hut getting your parts you might want to get a can of defluxer though. I use an acid brush they are those disposable brushes with the hollow metal tube handles, I cut down the bristles to a bit less than a half an inch to stiffen the brush (I like a slight angle to my bristles too, yeah I'm that picky. I guess an old toothbrush would work too if you don't have an acid brush YMMV) Apply the flux remover then brush the flux off the board. Really flux removing is an art in and of itself (then again there's always the big flush if you don't plan on too many more soldering projects. Just keep spraying the board with your defluxer (a wasteful practice). Let the board completely dry before powering it up. lots of times defluxer can hide under components. give the board a few good shakes during drying). Look at the board at an angle where you can see the goo, you might have to deflux 2 or 3 times to get rid of it all. Deflux both sides of the board! If you soldered the component right a little of the flux wicked to the other side of the board. Finished solder joints are bright, shiny, concave, and I love soldering!
Wow if you don't have the stuff to solder laying around I don't know how much you'd really save! I've had a soldering kit on hand since I was about 7 though so.... Solder, flux, iron, sponge, defluxer, brush, Scotchbrite. Maybe the cash outlay for all of this is what makes it a bad idea?
As for using an IDE controller for RAID thanks, but I already have SCSI.
Most of the ide offerings are so crap no (unreliable) that I think we're gonna need this.
You either cant count or you stick too close to the morphine locker, 4 * 32gig is 128gig, not 1.2TB
The previous comment shows why slashdot needs to keep ACs...
It is important not to neglect your most valued "hardware." It is so amazingly reliable (esp when only a few decades old), that it is easy to forget ;-)
--
If I'd known I was going to live this long, I'd have taken better care of myself. (forgot who said that).
Running a Quake 3 demo from id is legal because they explicitly give you those rights. Installing the BIOS from Promise is not legal becaues they didn't explicitly give you those rights.
This isn't that hard, folks.
And the compelling reason that I would even want to consider doing RAID with mass-produced, consumer-grade IDE drives, and an interface scheme that eats up easily twice the system overhead of a well-designed SCSI RAID controller is...?
Thank you, no. Real RAID systems are SCSI-based, and will likely remain so for the forseeable future. I will stick with what I know works.
What does a raid controller do for the performance of my system? I run GNU/Linux.
You could screw up two out of three cards and still be saving money!
It doesn't matter how slowly you say it, you're still wrong -- for exactly the reasons he said, none of which you've refuted.
You mean I can save $40 with only 4 hours of work?? If you can't find a job in IT that pays more than 10 bucks an hour, you've got bigger problems than getting a RAID controller working. :)
Do the modified ATA66 cards allow for hot swaping (with the right drive-bay adapters) that the FastTrak66's allow for?
I was under the impression (what do I know, I'm taking a semiconductor manufacturing course right now, with transistors and op amps next semester), that there is no real difference between the collector and emiter. NPN, PNP, C and E are the same, it is the base that you need to worry about.
4 cards, 8 ports. And at 2 channels per port, 16 drives?
"Harn't öl och brännvin är dä sörgelit då ä dä sörgelit då vill en bare dö, Harn't öl å brännvin då ä dä sörgelit, då vill en lägg' säj ner å tvärdö
Yup,
I did the same thing to my Caller ID. Simply unsolder one jumper (or, if you're lazy just cut it). By making two products that are that close physicly and charging so much more for the second the compainies are just being money-grubbing
Oh well, such is Capitalism.
The price of the basic controller clearly does not include any license to run the RAID software.
No, this is what you want.
Reminds me of the time I burned my toe with a soldering iron. Or when I discharged a camara flash cap through my tounge......
3 hard drives, pull one out, and you still get the same amount of space without any data loss. Replace it with another drive, and it'll reconstruct and propagate data to that new drive. Magic!
I use NT on my home computer, why?
Can't get 95 or Linux to support the promise ultra 66.
95 works, but in "compatability mode", linux only support this card in the 2.3 kernels.
Promise has a drive for RH6.0 but darn the install procedure looks like a real pain.
Of course I don't expect Linux to support every piece of hardware out there, but damn there are over a million of these in circulation, a lot on mainstream computers such as dell's and Gateway's.
The drivers exist, I don't see what the holdup is getting them into a stable Kernel.
Sigh, yeah do it myself etc. Like linux, but I don't have the time and NT works swell on aging ppro200.
Should have got the Ultra33 which works great with linux, but no I had to have the latest and greatest.
Keep on keeping on....
In Australia. The Promise Ultra66 costs $99 & the Promise Fast Trak costs $250. So yeah instead of calling me a $40 cheapskate. Just call me a $151 cheapskate. bye.
E=M*C^2 Peace
Hands up who modded there MFM controllers so they could have 4 MFM drives in their linux boxes years ago. I know i did.
that new gentus linux has the kernel patched to support the ata66 out-of-the-box that seems to be its only selling feature. you can grab the patch for the kernel from the linuxnewbie.org howto for ata66. it works great, I hope the next kernel has it in it.
Here's a RAID question... I've got an adaptec scsi U2FW that WAS running a hot swappable 2 baracuda 9GB 7200's in RAID 0, I purely need stable speed. Now I've maxed them out, and I'm upgrading to 4 32GB 7200's and again need the speed, but now I'm concerned that if I have to back up a 1.2 TB RAID, I'm screwed. With 2 drives, there was no redundancy issue. What's the fastest RAID configuration that I can manage and still be able to recover the data if only 1 of the 4 drives craps the bed at a time? Is RAID 1 redundant enough to recompilate the array if one drive dies, while still being fast? Mirroring serves me no purpose, and I'm not real clear on which striping method is most redundant, and which is fastest.
I wish I could solder on a transistor and get results like THAT!
Weirdo...
Raid5 distributes that X0R block evenly amongst all drives. And it is considerally slower than just simple striping. But the payoffs in having striping, at all, out weigh it.
i used to like slashdot alot more.
Goddamn, I can't get this right!
Try this instead
...but this method is much easier than the one posted on the main page. :)
And the next time I'll use the preview button.
This better work
Ich wirklich denke nicht daß deutsche Stoffe groß, weil die meisten relvent Fällen in der Welt in den US geschehen. Ein
Land ohne eine militärische Struktur ist im Allgemeinen unbrauchbar.
Slashdot social engineering at it's finest
This is pretty cool, but the guy could use some help with translation. It really looks funny with english words and german syntactical structure.
It really easy that syntactical structure to duplicate is. You must remember verb on the end to put, when you modifier use, such as "can" or "must". That really tripped me up when I was learning it...
oh well. I probably look like a dummkopf when I try to speck german.
If you can't figure out how to mail me, don't.
For linux tips: http://www.linuxtipsblog.com
did that make any sense to you?
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
I'll probably get moderated down, but I have to step on the soap box some time. The only people who have ever told me Jews are cheap are my jewish buddies. So why is it wrong when a non-jew says it? How do we even know he is a non-jew? It's like blacks calling themselves niggers, so why can't we? Nothing to do with racism, just realize the poster is a twit, and move on. And realize it's not a racist comment, because enough Jews are actually cheap to make the generalization semi-valid. (Though I believe the crime is generalizing something that should not be generalized.) The PC attitude is the same as racism, because it's dumb generalization of being offended by anything controversial and race-related. Your whining is as bad as the original statement.
Here is a site that describes a much simpler mod which accomplishes the same thing without needing to desolder the 32-pin chip.
..I just bought a new gateway computer last week and I still have not gotten linux to work on it yet!
It also doesn't support NT natively without unpluging both hard drives from the card and then doing an install by pluging the hard drives into the ide slot in your motherboard and then installing the driver and then opening the case up again and THEN pluging your hard drives back into the card. Rediculous !
There is also no native linux support and there is only a beta linux driver that is not raid compatible. To install the driver you must do the same steps as the NT installation. If you try to install linux you will recieve "Can not find hard disk" error.
If your motherboard comes with an ide ata-66 port soldered into it, then you are screwed! You will have to either a>) throw out your new computer or b:) put up with Windows and hope linux will support your new ata-66 eide ports someday right out of the box.
..oh. DO NOT EVER BUY A GATEWAY!
ahhh that feels alot better. The card doesn't make that much of a noticable difference in performance. The cards i/o is waaay behind scsi. For a server with alot of users, scsi is still the way to go. For workstations ata-66 might be a good deal. I would still stick with eide pio-mode 4 drives and ports for non servers.
It is still software RAID. You will have much better luck using the device as a normal ATA 66 controller and using Linux, BSD or even WinNT's software striping, mirroring or RAID 5 (interleaved striping+mirroring).
Nifty, yes.
Useful, no.
Unless you want to run the suboptimal Promise drivers on Win96/98/NT, I would run Promise drivers like I would Creative Labs sound drivers on my NT box. Please stick me in the eye with a hot poker.
Yes, "hardware hacking" is fun. But I wouldn't call pokeing around a little bit with commodity PC components "hardware hacking."
Hardware hacking is done with oscilloscopes, microcontrollers, EPROM burners, wire wrap sockets, and suchlike. Magazines like "Circuit Cellar INK" cover it, and it involves more than PeeCee software.
Your setup is still cheaper, but ultra160 SCSI is available now and it HAULS!. The controller is about $350, and a 18 gig drive costs about the same. Yes, now I have $700 invested and only 18 gigs to show for it, while your setup can be had for about $650US (2x$200US for the drives and $150US for the controller), and you've got 40 Gigs.
I plan on getting one of these ultra66 cards to try this out, but not for speed. I want to setup a striped mirror set of 4 20 gig IBM drives (40 gigs total) for fault tolerance.
AOL and Mathematica CD-ROM disks are physically identical products too, except for slight differences.
Catch a clue. The product vendor is selling their IP. You buy the cheap product, and you're buying the lower cost IP. You buy the more expensive product, you're buying much more sigificant chunk of IP.
If you don't understand the concept of Intellectual Property, maybe you don't belong in the computer industry.
You know that someone's going to find out how to fix it sometime or other..
Kinda reminds me of security by obscurity . . .
When really huge amounts of data at stake, I certainly have heard RAID suggested for this reason. Indeed, I reacall that it's as an inexpensive alternative that my database administration textbooks introduced it. With prices on large drives going down, it's starting to be used more strictly for redundancy in many places -- but that doesn't make the original use invalid.
You're in the wrong place. The workstation users are over there ---------->. These are peecee lusers. They've never heard of the service contract. Probably because any vendor who offered them on peecees would go under in five seconds.
Right. I know they're not full-blown RAID cards. But that's the exact same thing for the Promise cards described.
Thanks for the tip... I'll look into getting one over the summer...
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Hmm... I know that some of the older Athlon mobos couldn't supply enough power to both the processor and the card, dunno about the Super7 mainboards.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
A translation of the German text (which is not much better than the English one, BTW):
...
"A friend of mine brought me to the idea to publish this on the Internet so that other POWER USERS also have the possibility to feast their eyes on how fast you can STILL get your PC".
Not that this was very important
Sebastian
You still don't get it, do you?
The FasrTrack BIOS updates are for people who purchased FasTrack cards (repeat until cognition (oops, I used a Clamism, but it fits)). It is not for people who bought the non-RAID card and modified it.
Just because you can access it from their FTP server does NOT make it yours to do with as you please.
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
shift click this link for the 2.2.14 patch. I am using it right now, works great. I havent modded the controller yet, so all i am saying is it supports the non-raid udma66 controller, but im not sure why it wouldent support it in raid mode if it is after all the same card.
In the early '70s, the U. of Maryland had a timesharing Univac 1106 for most of its compute power. The story I heard was this:
When Univac build the 1108, they priced it to recover their engineering costs with relatively low sales levels (read: high cost).
It turned out to be much more successful than their forecasts predicted, so the fixed costs were amortized quickly, and they could drop the price and sell lots more at a still-tidy profit. However, they didn't want to rile those who'd paid the big bucks. So, they introduced the 1106---same machine, but slower clock speed. Lots of folks bought it, thought it was neat, and Univac was happy.
Of course, the time came (sooner rather than later) when someone poked around enough to notice that the only difference was a resistor and a crystal. So, after a trip to Radio Shack with a few bucks, your low-budget machine would run just as well as the high-prices spread---double the speed. Lots of those got used at schools and anywhere else hackers congregated, until Univac cheapened enough components to make the 1106 a truly slow machine.
See note 6 to this document for some corroborative detail, but a quick search reveals nothing else on the web, durnit.
I refuse to believe corporations are people until Texas executes one. -- desert rain on http://www.dailykos.com/user/
> I was under the impression that there is no real difference between the collector and emitter
>
err, note that all we're talking about is bipolar junction transistors, not FET, so assume that's what I mean when I say "transistor".
Well, qualitatively, the collector and emitter are equivalent. It's the junctions you have to worry about, and one junction is more heavily doped than the other. Also, IIRC, the geometry of some transisters (all, these days?) is such that the emitter is at the surface of the silicon, the base is a layer around that, and the collector is another layer around that. Therefore, the collector is much better at collecting electrons (or holes) emitted by the emitter than vice-versa.
The net result here is that the gain is a lot higher if you put the transistor in the way it was meant to go. The junctions are doped differently, too, and you can tell which is the emitter and which is the collector by using a multimeter/diode tester across the junction. On this 2N3904 I've got here, the B-E junction measure 0.631V, and the B-C junction measures 0.655V, with a Micronta 22-181B DMM's diode tester function. (It measure bias voltage at some current like 1mA.)
#define X(x,y) x##y
#define X(x,y) x##y
Peter Cordes ; e-mail: X(peter@cordes ,
I think you want raid5. It uses one drive to hold an XOR of the other drives. (That means that one drive becomes the bottleneck, though.)
So with 4 drives, it might work better to have divide your drives into two pairs, and make one pair the mirror of the other pair. Inside each pair, the drives are raid0 striped. All this is talked about in Linux docs about the kernel's software raid capabilities, so your hardware might not be so flexible. I think the raid10 described in the article said it was 2 pairs of drives striped and mirrored like I was saying, so do that.
#define X(x,y) x##y
#define X(x,y) x##y
Peter Cordes ; e-mail: X(peter@cordes ,
When I was first getting into electronics, I was desoldering old boards that my high school electronics prof had lying around for parts. I just had a normal soldering iron, though. One time, I pressed too hard and the ceramic part that holds the metal tip broke, dropping a hot metal cylinder on my floor. I rolled it around until it cooled off, but there are still black marks on the sheet of masonite. hehe :) I later got a real desoldering iron, very nice :) Once I learned about programming and Unix, I mostly stopped hardware hacking, though.
#define X(x,y) x##y
#define X(x,y) x##y
Peter Cordes ; e-mail: X(peter@cordes ,
The guy's page said it was a pull-up resistor, IIRC. That means that some chip has a digital input that makes it do one thing if it gets a low input, and do another thing if it gets a high input. Basically, you flip the RAID-mode switch by moving the resistor. It's like a jumper that wasn't designed to be moved, but you can move it with some effort.
#define X(x,y) x##y
#define X(x,y) x##y
Peter Cordes ; e-mail: X(peter@cordes ,
Sorry to be a tight-ass (in your opinion, probably), but if you've got a point, could you not use racial slurs to make it? I'm not Jewish, but that offends me. I'm not offended by words like "fuck", which don't actually insult anyone other than the person you use it against.
To answer your question, people who would try this are hardware hackers, and people with more skill than you have, luser.
#define X(x,y) x##y
#define X(x,y) x##y
Peter Cordes ; e-mail: X(peter@cordes ,
To bring an informative AC post (#164) up to a 1, I hereby quote /mbr followed by an fdisk, follwed by a format. i spent days with this before i discovered the source of the problem."
"hate to tell you this but its not a controller problem. The problem is a nice little program given you by the kind folks at gateway called ez-drive. a drive manager blindly installed on all gateway pc's. makes the drive useless without a fdisk
Can anybody tell me why post #72 is an AC but gets a +1 without any indication of moderation?
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
"The ATA66 controllers are cheap (esp. compared to the RAID controller)..."
I thought that was the whole point, getting a raid controller at the much lower price of the ATA66.
I assumed moving the pull-up (pull-down?) resistor from R10 to R9 was to tell the chip to think of itself as a raid controller instead of as a 66. Where would you attach a capacitor and why?
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
Like I said, I'm sure you already thought of this but just in case, do you need to disable your mobo's regular primary ide port or otherwise free up an IRQ and/or DMA ?
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
The difference is that the 10 Ohm would let 10 times as much current flow, which might not be desirable.
By the way, Ohm is capitalized, as it is in honor of one of the many whose contributions to science allow us to have these wonderful playthings.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
Still trying to get people to look at that picture of your face?
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
The real crime here is that businesses are allowed to engage in this sort of practice.
The issue is clouded by the firmware argument (although your asinine Piracy and Physical Theft analogies do nothing to sway educated minds to your position) but the fact remains this is just another example of forced price differentiation.
Electronics companies have been doing it for years, whether it is leaving off components that would have a negligible cost addition to manufacturing, actually crippling circuits, or just limiting features with switches or software.
The mentality used to justify this behavior doesn't support progress, it in fact stifles it.
The laws shouldn't favour protecting "Intellectual Property" rights. They should favour protecting consumers rights.
Make no mistake, this is about maximizing profits only, not encouraging innovation. So the Neo-Con's among you say "Great 'Free Market' Rah...Rah..Rah..you think you can build a better mouse trap, go ahead!" So I go ahead, spend the capital investment on engineering, manufacturing & marketing the product. Only guess what, now that I've entered the market, all they do is un-cripple their product, taking away my market, putting me out of business, so they can do it again. The fact that it would be more efficient for that company to only engineer, manufacture, market & support one model, has no bearing in this economy. Competition My Ass.
Instead of the DMCA & UCITA, what we really need are limits on the ability of corporations to sell products of similar manufacturing costs at vastly different retail prices. I know this is seemingly a novel concept to you anti-interventionist types, but we already have a precedent with Usury Laws.
If you ever want an example of how much progress was potentially stalled and how bad things could get, do a search on Tandy Computer for some of the shenanigans they used to pull. For those that will say their demise is a fine example of "The Market" working, just remember their ultimate downfall was that they just got too greedy. A little less greed and you have what you have now; Less consumer choice and ever more profit maximizing at large Trans-National Corporations.
The antithesis of progress for the citizenry in a democracy.
Tom
You call my argument asinine?
t . Some good examples that immediately come to mind are, Long-Distance Phone Calls, Computers, Commercial Software & Cellular. Once manufacturers stopped chasing margin percentage, and switched to margin dollars, it became more profitable for them, and the citizenry benefited by the ability to afford the advancements.
No, I called your analogies asinine. The debate on both sides will never be useful if we continue to promote attempts at swaying public opinion by misappropriating language. No one was talking about taking their galleons out to sea to commandeer a shipment of Promise Cards. No one was depriving another person of a physical possession.
Maybe my analogies weren't the greatest, but that doesn't invalidate my position [perhaps a better analogy yet would be downloading a crack that turns demo software into commercial software].
Again, not a valid analogy. The best one I can think of would be a crack or change in configuration that would allow a greater number of users or features in software you already legally possessed. As per my original post, the downloading of firmware is what the specific rights issue at hand is.
You haven't really said anything in your entire response other than vaguely stating your opinion of the way things should be.
And giving an opinion is invalid because? It is through learned discourse that the advancement of knowledge is perpetuated.
And even then all you have really said is some vague and completely unsupported claims that these practices stifle progress.
I didn't think they were particularly vague. If progress is defined as the advancement of knowledge and prosperity for the citizens in a democracy, then anything which slows the adoption of technologies that will advance that society by definition "stifles" progress. If progress is defined by the protection of artificial scarcity in order to benefit mainly elite interests, then the status quo is working fine.
What it boils down to is that you [flames aside] actually think that a company doesn't have the right to charge a fair price for their product.
FAIR is the key word. Look, I'm not some anarcho-socialist, I just don't buy into libertarian capitalism either. I prefer the concept that brought us such minor advancements like The Internet, The Mixed Economy. And as a citizen in a democratic mixed economy, as much as I would like to see growth of commerce, I don't believe it should go un-tempered. My pet peeve that relates to the topic at hand, is the use of forced scarcity (i.e. denying greater functionality of technology by crippling a product in order to create an artificial price barrier) as a tool to maximize profits, where greater advancement of technology and greater efficiency of commerce would be more beneficial. If you need it spelled out for you, you would get greater deployment of technology if it were more affordable. This technology could be used to further progress. You would more than likely make more money in the long run because you would be shipping more units, and you would save on less duplication of design/engineering/manufacturing/marketing/suppor
It isn't like Promise has a monopoly on RAID devices.
What other cards offer the same functionality as the IDE RAID card in a similar price range to the Non-RAIDed card?? (I haven't looked in a while, but Promise seemed to have the most ubiquity)
It isn't like this is price fixing.
No, your right, collusion would be much worse. But just as collusion is one form of an artificial price barrier, so is this.
They just are charging a fair price for a product that gives more functionality than one of their other products. Would you think it would be fair for [going back to my "asinine" analogies] say Ford to charge you as much for a 4cyl Mustang as for the 5.0 version?
Again, fairness. What is the cost to Ford for the bigger engine? There is physically more material. There would be greater engineering work to account for heat, weight, fuel efficiency, safety. Would it require different tooling and molds? Would it require different assembly runs, etc...? These are very real physical costs. What I am talking about is when you design a product from the get-go to include a set a features, and then cripple some of those features in order to differentiate price, when there isn't a commensurate decrease in manufacturing cost.
When you get right down to it, that car doesn't cost much more to manufacture either [in fact, essentially no more]. The difference is the amount of engineering time that went into designing that higher performance engine.
I don't know what your background is, but I actually know someone who engineers cars, and as per above there are real costs above and beyond engineering. The other factor is your market. The reason for different engines in your mustang example is that some people want the look and feel of the car, without the added fuel & insurance costs. I have yet to hear anyone say "No I just refuse to pay that extra $5 because I don't foresee myself ever needing RAID functionality in my host adapter, so I will not be purchasing that product". (I have seen people be cheap, but even the cheap people I know wouldn't go to that extreme)
The problem is that there are a lot of idiots out there that don't seem to get that one simple point.
Agreed, there are a lot of idiots that can't seem to grasp a simple point.
They just ignore it and spout off some irrelevant fodder about how the "Free market economists are ruining everything"
Actually I think the abdication of responsibility is what's ruining things. What I disapprove of are attempts by people with the Neo-Conservative agenda to attempt to ruin my social democracy by gutting it of its values with threats of capital flight. I'm not some fresh out of Philosophy 101 Marxist. I've given great thought to the current socio-economic climate and have concluded that this mixed economy is moving too far towards what could become a system where corporate rights are taken more seriously than individual rights. You're living a pipe dream if you think this is a "Free Market". But unlike those who think the answer is to dismantle all regulation, I have come to the conclusion that the greater threat is from what is now being termed "Corporate Welfare" or from what are becoming De-Facto monopolies and oligopolies. Before you just write this off as a loony political rant, one of the methods that is used to exert control is as per my original post the use of artificial market barriers. What incentive is there for me to make a more functional product to service a market, when all it will take to bankrupt me is for my competitor to un-cripple their product? This reduces consumer choice, which slows the advancement of technology, which stifles progress.
Companies charge more for certain product not ONLY because they can but ALSO because they want to recoup their costs.
As someone who has witnessed first hand the failure of artificial price barriers to recoup costs (The Tandy Example) and as someone who has witnessed first hand the example of the switch from margin percentage to margin dollars, (The I.S.P. industry, and the others above) what I can tell you is that in the long run companies are better off reducing productions costs and increasing volume.
Rather than waste any more of my time picking apart your completely incoherent argument,
I'll leave it to others to speculate in public the reasons.
I'll just let the truly educated readers decide for themselves.
Indeed.
Without Malice,
Tom
I've been looking at RAID setups over the last few days. I'm just yer average geek who doesn't have unlimited funds, but who likes speed, and really really wants to not lose data.
What I'm thinking of getting is 4x28GB 7200RPM IDE drives (4x$199), putting most of the first three drives into a software RAID 5 using a 2.2 kernel and the 0.90 md patches, and using the fourth disk as combination hot-spare, scratch space, and incremental backups for my home directory and other parts of the filesystem which a) change frequently and b) I want old revisions available in case I trash something important.
I have four IDE channels on my motherboard, so I can put each disk on a separate channel, and make the seldom-used CDROM and CDR drives slave drives. So contention between disks shouldn't be a problem.
I'm not sure about the backups. This still leaves me vulnerable to accidentally blowing away large quantities of un-backed-up data, but it's stuff I don't change much, and might have copies of on CDR. (Like the MP3 collection.) And I'm not sure what the alternative is.
Tape drives that have anywhere-near-enough native capacity seem ridiculously expensive. RAID with more devices and SCSI disks is also too damn expensive - 100GB of SCSI disk is like $2500, way out of my budget.
Setting up two drives in a RAID 0 and periodically copying the same data to another two drives is another possibility, and protects me against an "oops" that I notice immediately, but doesn't do anything about a bad mistake that I notice the next day, and ensures that I'll lose my day's work if one of the primary drives dies.
Thoughts? I've never set up something like this, and could use all the advice I could get.
Another question: What do people think of hard drive coolers, like the CoolerMaster? ( Ars Technica review) Useful addition to preserve drive life, or a waste of money and bays?
Thanks,
Alan
If, however, your time is not free (most people value their time), then maybe getting the supported card is a better value. It really depends. If you're still in college, and so buying a Fastrak means eating Ramen for a month, then it's worth it. Otherwise, it's debatable.
--Joe--
Program Intellivision!
You learn from your mistakes.
I learned how to solder.
Many years later. I'm soldering up a bunch of connections on a research ship that is bobbing up and down. After many failures, the final connections works. Unfortunately, the person (me) using the soldering iron learns a new lesson. Remember to get some fresh air. Soldering fumes suck. Soldering on a moving platform really sucks.
200' mast? You are a better man that me Gunga Din.:-)
I think it's part of a hacker mindset: doing things just because they are possible, doing things because they are interesting, doing things just because. And once you do it why not share it with others? Sharing is at least half the fun.
I wonder what will be Promise's response to this. I hope this won't turn into yes another conflict between industry and hackerdom over "information wants to be free".
----
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
It doesn't need to be "downloaded" to the CPU. It simply exists in memory space.
You know when you see a message on your screen regarding the card during system boot up? That is proof positive that this thing has an "expansion ROM" which integrates with the BIOS. If you refuse to believe that it replaces any BIOS service calls, then you can do that, but its a relatively trivial affair to write a DOS program to check the memory locations of the BIOS routines and check them when the card is present and not present.
-josh
Of course you get twice the throughput. It's a software raid. Didn't I just say that?
The downside of course is that it wastes CPU and that it is completely useless if you're a linux user. More significantly, there is no way for the user to know these things by looking at the box. That's a real shame.
-josh
Sorry about the bold.
-josh
If so, yes it is possible.
But really, what do you think? One set of hardware is generally different from another, with many, many exceptions.
I haven't mod'd a PSX yet that I haven't burnt at least one finger... Usually 2. I need to learn how to desolder, though. Too many times I've cleaned up after a freind that had a habit of puttnig more solder on the wire while it was above the motherboard and had managed to drip a huge drip on it... Usually over 2-3 diodes. I actually managed to get them all working again, and all but 1 I got chipped sucessfully after that.
:-)
I would try this hack with this card myself but I have no need for an ATA66 controller, nor a raid card. I've got one IDE drive, one SCSI drive, 2 SCSI CD-R's, and an IDE CD read drive in my machine. Whacko setup and it still works, go figure. Oh, and I managed to set it up so I boot off the SCSI drive (in Windows), figure that one out
- 8Complex
It's late, so i'll keep this extremely short. I suggested RAID 3 over RAID 5 because there was an apparent emphasis on working with large files. That lead me to believe that they were working with imaging files of some sort, which is what the case turned out to be. I'd firmly stand by RAID 3 over 5 any day for applications such as imaging and video... Ones where there are large read and write operations and a minimal amount of seeks... If that were the case, which would be usual for file and database servers, i'd definetly suggest RAID 5
Hey... I'll take your job :)
Anyways. In that instance, you really want RAID 3... It's much higher performance than RAID 5, because the redundancy is on one drive and the rest all dedicate themselves to read/write in a striped set. If any one of the drives goes down - read up on this first, though - you definetly don't lose any data. I'm not sure about hotswappability, though... If RAID 3 turns out to be non-hotswappable, then your only option turns out to be RAID 5.
There's gotta be a book like
"temperance for dummies". Read it.
Use tin-silver solder. Certain alloys
are quite harmless even if swallowed.
Uh.. speed and redundancy? Hotswap is nice, I won't argue with that. But going down for half an hour to "cold swap" a disk still beats going down for several hours and restoring a day-old tape.
Even crappy RAID is better than no RAID at all. The availability of IDE RAID is a Good Thing. It just happens to be a poor choice at the high end, that's all.
---
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
OK kids, stop fighting. The board is yours and you can stick it up your nose if you want to. That will void the warranty though. The BIOS update for Promise FastTrack66 is available for download from Promise's own web site and downloading it from there is no more related to theft then downloading a Quake 3 demo from ID software site. And after that software is on my computer I can do whatever I want with it except the things prohibited by license like disassembling or selling the darn thing. Flashing wrong BIOS chip with it is not prohibited but is also not supported. As long as I am not trying to blame Promise after I screwed up my card the whole procedure is absolutely legal. And as to that statement about make, the guy didn't clame to be an electrical engineer or something. If you are so freaking smart tell us what is the function of that resistor.
Everybody Lies. But it doesn't matter since nobody listens.
Specifically, which chipset/motherboard are you having this problem with? I have high hopes for VIA, although I know they're not the best, so I keep tabs on things like this.
Also, if you don't mind, what exactly goes wrong?
e-mail me if you would rather
No soldering job is complete until you've burnt yourself
I'm curious whether anyone has tried this yet. I have a Promise Ultra66, and my dad is very handy with soldering. If it works, well...hey!
I wanted to buy it, but I couldn't find buying books for dummies anywhere....
No it wont. The resistor you have to move is below the BIOS and would be below the socket, so you would have to remove the socket too :) :)
Honestly, did you read the article?
Nice suggestion...
:)
Not unless you want to sacrifice a few IQ points!
(this is waaaay of-topic)
I read an interesting blurblet about how the human body may have sacrificed a tail in favor of supporting a larger brain - the theory is that evolution decided a larger brain was more deserving of protein, bloodflow, etc. than the tail, and therefore brainer genetics won out over "tailier" genetics.
That's the theory, anyway. Not sure I believe it, because obese people do not lose their minds, despite having to support substantially more mass than a "normal" person. But interesting to think about...
nebulo
Actually, I don't think this sucks.
Seems to me it's actually more efficient. After all, if they weren't making these two cards in such a similar fashion, both cards would end up costing more because they'd have to design two cards, two manufacturing processes, and two sets of firm/software. We actually get lower prices from these two cards being so similar.
The other reason they make these two cards is to get greater market saturation with their products. Some people will buy the $20 controller for their PC but would never afford RAID; some admins will buy the $65 RAIDer but would shop elsewhere if all they could find was a $20 cheapie controller.
Apple is doing this with their hardware line. Top to bottom, server to PowerBook, they share the same motherboard design, the Unified Motherboard Architecture. It's exciting because they enjoy much faster design-production cycles and we get lower prices and better product availability (ask anybody who's waited weeks-months for their G4 to arrive).
So I think this approach really does make sense, even if it is just a marketing ploy on behalf of the board manufacturer. I'm sure this is flamebait, but I do think it's rational.
nebulo
You could move the mouse with it, and become as productive as Zimbu!
While a third hand would undoubtedly be useful, I can imagine it getting in the way and I'd have to get new shirts and jackets.
I'd much rather have a prehensile tail. It'd be great! It could hold the soldering iron while my hands hold the piece work.
Other benefits of a tail:
- It would balance me while I ski / mountain bike
- It could turn on my scuba air valve when I jump off the dive boat without remembering to check it (duh!).
- Scratch my back in all the really itchy places
Yeah! A tail is the way to go! I can't wait until genetic engineering makes it a possibility!
Kren
-----BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK----- Version: 3.12 GAT d-- a? C++ UX+ L++ P++ E--- W+++$ N++ o-- !K !w O---- M++$ !V PS++
thats a silly attitude. hardware hacking is a lot of fun..even if you dont really profit from it.
I just wonder how it is that (yes, I realize, among _other_ things) a resistor is 'integral' to making the card be a RAID controller... what's so important about the resistor that apparently allows it to wield such power?
Is it just that it impedes power to the part of the card that controls RAID?
Also.. um, why make a card that can be used for RAID controlling, when you're not selling it as a RAID card? You know that someone's going to find out how to fix it sometime or other..
(If these questions were answered in the article, oops...........)
Insert mind here.
http://www.storagereview.com/welcome.pl/http://www .storagereview.com/ubb/Forum1/HTML/00296 4.html Easier soldering and you don't have to pop the BIOS chip off.
Unfortunately, yes, according to his page, you have to unsolder the 32-pin BIOS chip as part of the procedure. Sounds like a fun project anyway.
Best new white rapper since Pimp Daddy Welfare... Pimp-T!
You're the second person I've heard recently call it that (the other not on /.), so I guess I can call it a trend.
Up until now, I've always understood it as, "Redundant Array of Independent Disks." The other (new??) definition seems to suggest that if I stack up a bunch of Quantum Ultra-10K drives then I no longer have RAID because the disks are no longer inexpensive. RAED, maybe?
Anyway, I don't know which is right. Can somebody in the know clarify?
--
"I have a good idea why it's hard to verify programs. They're usually wrong." --Manuel Blum, FOCS 94
I've always considered the main features of RAID to be redundancy and striping. I don't think I've ever heard anybody say, "We're going with RAID because of the cost-effectiveness!"
--
"I have a good idea why it's hard to verify programs. They're usually wrong." --Manuel Blum, FOCS 94
If you want speed and redundancy there is no other solution than going to raid 1+0 or raid 0+1.
In this configuration you stripe the disks normally (raid 0) and mirror either the whole partition or the individual slices.
This method combines ultra high performance (raid 0) with redundancy, provided you provide extra controllers and disks. If you want good write performance, forget anything but raid 0.
This pretty much summarises the whole discussion here. Moderate up please.
This card is a software raid solution, the flash prom contains software raid drivers similar to the linux md drivers. This modification makes sense if you need raid under dos/windows which is supported by Promises software bios and drivers. Linux has its own drivers doing the same thing, called md.
The resistor (yep, it's a resistor, not a transistor) is only in place to distinguish between the two boards, and make sure that users who need software raid in bios have to pay for it.
There is no reason why a modified card should give higher performance under linux what so ever.
RFC1925
Ok, so where is the *REAL* English translation?
I don't have the patience to hold a whole paragraph of 20 words in my mind at once and jumble all of such words in said mind until the damn sentences make any sense whatsoever.
One thing that came to mind reading the first few sentences, and is still causing an intermittent chuckle...
The English "t4ranslation" page sounds like it was written by TechnoYoda.
*grin*
This really depends on what you're talking about, back in my SysAdmin days, I'd NEVER use software RAID if I had a choice (and given, there were a few times when I didn't), but if you're just going to run this on a home/play machine, go nuts. I've never spent much time using the linux software RAID setup, but I never had a problem with vinum under FreeBSD, it's not really all that difficult to setup either.
But if you're thinking about a RAID solution for a "real" system, I'd really recommend against using software RAID (and I'd never use IDE disks in something like that anyway). Preformance issues aside, it's nice to be able to just unplug the card and move it to a different machine, instead of having to re set-up the software RAID or copying configurations over, etc. Especially if it's something at a remote location and the best you can do is talk somebody through it over the phone to get a system up. It's also a lot easier for some random junior sysadmin to screw up your software RAID configuration than it is for him to jump into the hardware config without knowing he's doing something wrong.
Just my $0.02 worth.
They are actually doing you a favor. If they sold only the raid card it would be for 65 bucks not 20, by disabling raid they can still get 65 bucks from the people who want raid, but if you dont want it then you don't have to pay extra for a feature you don't care about.
treke
A configuration that I have seen and used a lot (even in very high end HP systems) is to put system+software+swap on a pair of software mirrored internal disks, then use an extrnal hardware RAID for data.
I wouldn't use software RAID 5 on any non-Linux system, nor would I use it in a critical situation. But for internal web/mail/fileserver type tasks, I would use it in a minute.
I am looking at setting up 4 7200 RPM IDE disks with software RAID at home, just to play with it, but that is another issue entirely.
I don't see why you couldn't conversely solder on a capacitor and flash the BIOS. But why? The ATA66 controllers are cheap (esp. compared to the RAID controller) and most RAID controllers have a single disk mode anyways.
Where I work, we use software RAID on the UNIX boxes (Level 3 database servers supporting at least 10,000 users) exclusively. On the NT servers, we're using hardware RAID exclusively.
Basically, what it boils down to is what are you using the server for? For some things, hardware raid just gets in the way (e.g. large database servers), and on others software raid just sucks down the CPU cycles and bus bandwidth needlessly, or is too dangerous (e.g. Windows NT).
Best rule of thumb: research, research, research.
For a split second, I thought your nick was PB, which really made me think...
No offense intended to the first poster. I would'nt doubt that he has written some great posts that deserved a score of 3 and some interesting ones at that.
But how did that post get a "3, interesting"?
Anyway, something I find interesting is that the guy at the link says "7) Desolder the BIOS chip from the card.", Huh? It is clearly a socketted EEPROM of sorts. Why desolder it? Is the socket covering the SMD resistor? If so, can't the plastic just be cut away more easily?
I've been soldering on and off since leaving school 12 years ago, doing it for the Navy, etc and I would'nt like to be desoldering a 32pin socket without a desoldering gun. Doing it with wick or a sucker is surely not going to be as easy as just removing the chip and cutting the plastic.
War crimes, torture, lies, illegal spying... Would someone give Bush a blowjob, already, so he can be impeached?
I am going to go out and buy all the parts and give it a whirl. At the worst, I'm out a few bucks. At the best, I've found a way to save s pretty chunk of change for my boss...
RAID controller $125
IDE $35
Time Spent @ pay rate ???
Savings Very Little
What you end up with is a RAID controller that that has limited reliability. Yes, this hack may work, at least for now. It's quite likely that there's some way the BIOS can tell which version or the card it's running on, and just isn't checking it right now. Next time they release a patch to the RAID BIOS you're hacked board becomes a paperweight. You also lose anything that resembles a warranty.
This seems like a neat thing to try at home, where it's your time your, and your data that's being wasted if things don't work out. But your boss may not be as happy with you as you think when he sees you taking a soldering iron to the board that's going to be used as a RAID controller to store improtant company data.
Maybe I should tell about the time when I was twelve and dropped a soldering iron while working on my HO setup. I tried to catch it before it hit the floor. The floor was concrete, and was considerably less affected by the iron than I was.
Ouchie.
And the brethren went away edified.
I don't know about that whole netapp thing. Netapps are nice, but they're all nfs'd.. EMCs on the other hand provide fibre channel direct to the machine.
EMCs are much, much more expensive however. They have a nice service plan (the service guy shows up and just replaces the power supply, disk, etc, and you really don't even have to know about it.)
Does anyone have any experience with netapps in real production environments? Do they generate a ton of network traffic? Mount options that make them perform better? Comments?
Gehts nicht auch nen' wink freundlicher?
Ahh, the old big-corporation-ripping-off-the-consumer-trick, that's the second time I've fallen for it this month.
// TODO: fix sig
Yes, warranty.
That's the part that lets my landsharks go after their landsharks if their card costs me money.
Doesn't really apply to home users...but not all Linux is in the home.
Yes, that's really my e-mail. Don't change a thing.
And in a home environment, that's fine and I encourage you. After all, some of the best kit has come from end users pushing the limits.
But.
Don't ever let me catch you pulling that kind of crap in my data center.
If anything breaks, I have to answer to managers, and "I read it on Slashdot, they said it was safe" is not an acceptable answer.
Yes, that's really my e-mail. Don't change a thing.
So you think the BIOS, the transistor and the software inside the BIOS worth nothing?
I'm not so sure that it is unusable. I used software RAID on Linux boxen for servers running INN for a full news feed way back under kernel 1.2, and it worked fine. Sure, I wasn't supporting a ISP-style workload (only 150 internal users), but it was fine.
So, I think that IN CERTAIN SITUATIONS, software RAID is OK, especially in linux.
Allan
Yes, it is bad, but it's the way these things work. Most of the cost of a product is the engineering behind it, so companies cut down on it as much as possible. But they still have to have a marketing scheme. In fact that is the most important part of a company that wants to make money. The reason why Intel and MS make so much money is marketing, not superior products.
I imagine its the whole programming behind it, and the reliability that the RAID needs, that drives up the price. Intel sells the same chip, with the Mhz rating jacked up to a nice round number, for twice the price all the time, so does AMD, motorola, etc. Its all about the reliability and R&D time put into it.
That is funny for so many reasons, but im not going to go into it because i am having to copy/paste the space's into this sentance. I love school computers. :) Eraser_
Before I will try messing with the card, I would first like to see it work correctly in my system.
How have people gotten their ATA66 cards working? I plugged mine in, and when i have a drive hooked up to it, and the BIOS installs properly, i get conflicts up the wazoo. Windows refuses to boot, and linux gives up eventually. All my hard drives read and my cd-roms hold solid for a few minutes, then go back to normal, etc. I have all the drivers installed, and the kernel module loaded (the one with stock 2.2.x, 2.3.latest decided it didnt like my HD's superblock, while latest - 2 did, heh).
So anyone have some tricks up their sleave to getting this to work? I emailed tech support 2 weeks before x-mas, and again the beginging of february, have yet to see a reply from them.
Eraser_
Why does it suck? It lowers manufacturing costs, which means they can make more money and/or offer consumer's a lower price. I'm sorry I just don't see the problem here. Of course the downside (from manufacturer's perspective) is that just like people overclock their cpus, now they will their ide cards.
Warranty work on a $20 card?
Tech support? Is that when you read how-to's?
"Anyone else see the problem with this picture?"
;-)
Nope, faster hard drive only loads Q3 faster, doesn't play any faster.
I have to admit, that is even better yet of an analogy.
And giving an opinion is invalid because? It is through learned discourse that the advancement of knowledge is perpetuated.
Allow me to elaborate. The point was not to question your right to state your opinion. It was the lack of sufficient evidence to support such a radical position. If "learned discourse" is to be practiced, then you must at least state some reason for your position.
I didn't think they were particularly vague. If progress is defined as the advancement of knowledge and prosperity for the citizens in a democracy, then anything which slows the adoption of technologies that will advance that society by definition "stifles" progress. If progress is defined by the protection of artificial scarcity in order to benefit mainly elite interests, then the status quo is working fine.
For starters, there is not probably even one reader of slashdot that really lives in a democracy. US citizens live in a representative republic. NOT a democracy. True democracy is subject to the tyranny of the masses. And I, myself, am proud of the fact that we don't live in a society where every average idiot has the ability to directly influence public policy.
But that is an irrelevant issue of semantics. The point is well taken that progress is the "advancement ... for citizens", but you are making this into an issue that it is not [the point I am trying to make].
FAIR is the key word. ...I prefer the concept that brought us such minor advancements like ... as much as I would like to see growth of commerce, I don't believe it should go un-tempered. My pet peeve that relates to the topic at hand, is the use of forced scarcity (i.e. denying greater functionality of technology by crippling a product in order to create an artificial price barrier) as a tool to maximize profits, where greater advancement of technology and greater efficiency of commerce would be more beneficial. [spelling out]
Fair enough. The point here is your perspective. You see a company selling a fundamentally similar product for two different prices and cry foul. You seem to believe that Promise is screwing over their customers by charging either too much for one product, and/or not enough for another. I agree with you, that companies purposefully holding back technology in the interests of profits is not a good thing for continued technological growth. But they simply aren't doing that.
If you need it spelled out for you, you would get greater deployment of technology if it were more affordable. This technology could be used to further progress. You would more than likely make more money in the long run because you would be shipping more units, and you would save on less duplication of design/engineering/manufacturing/marketing/support . Some good examples that immediately come to mind are, Long-Distance Phone Calls, Computers, Commercial Software & Cellular.
Affordable technology only works as a philosophy if it is affordable for the manufacturers as well. Yes, it doesn't cost Promise twice as much to produce the actual board for the RAIDversion, but it does cost them more to develop it.
Once manufacturers stopped chasing margin percentage, and switched to margin dollars, it became more profitable for them, and the citizenry benefited by the ability to afford the advancements.
I find it would be hard for you to back this up with numbers. Retailers are suffering MASSIVELYdue to the cut-throat margins. When you just look at dollar margins, you aren't taking into account infrastructure (the reason why margins are so highly valued). You need people/equipment to move around/sell your product, and margin percentage is simply a more practical way to look at it [from the sales manager's perspective]. Dollar margins are only significant when these are taken into account. Blaming this [at all] on margin percentages is a gross oversimplification.
Now, what I think you really meant was gross/net profit.
What other cards offer the same functionality as the IDE RAID card in a similar price range to the Non-RAIDed card?? (I haven't looked in a while, but Promise seemed to have the most ubiquity)
On IDE-RAID, possibly the only manufacturer (I believe there are some starting to emerge though). But for RAIDin general, there are hundreds of companies that offer RAIDdevices.
That is a matter of perspective.
"They just are charging a fair price for a product that gives more functionality than one of their other products. Would you think it would be fair for [going back to my "asinine" analogies] say Ford to charge you as much for a 4cyl Mustang as for the 5.0 version? "
Again, fairness. What is the cost to Ford for the bigger engine? There is physically more material. There would be greater engineering work to account for heat, weight, fuel efficiency, safety. Would it require different tooling and molds? Would it require different assembly runs, etc...? These are very real physical costs. What I am talking about is when you design a product from the get-go to include a set a features, and then cripple some of those features in order to differentiate price, when there isn't a commensurate decrease in manufacturing cost.
"When you get right down to it, that car doesn't cost much more to manufacture either [in fact, essentially no more]. The difference is the amount of engineering time that went into designing that higher performance engine."
I don't know what your background is, but I actually know someone who engineers cars, and as per above there are real costs above and beyond engineering. The other factor is your market. The reason for different engines in your mustang example is that some people want the look and feel of the car, without the added fuel & insurance costs. I have yet to hear anyone say "No I just refuse to pay that extra $5 because I don't foresee myself ever needing RAID functionality in my host adapter, so I will not be purchasing that product". (I have seen people be cheap, but even the cheap people I know wouldn't go to that extreme)
This is the contradiction that Ihave been referring to. You see, think about it. What is the difference between ford engineers designing a 5.0 engine, and Promise's engineers designing a RAID card? You seem to claim in this situation [the car] it is justified, but not in the situation with Promise's RAIDcard. Why? [the lack of justification I am talking about]. From a gross materials standpoint, the difference between the 4cyl and 5.0 engine is marginal [a couple of pounds of metal]. The difference in production costs is there [different molds/different machining processes], but not NEARLYin the amount of the difference of the price of the car (which is SEVERALthousand dollars). Now, no; Ido not have a direct view of what Ford's manufacturing processes are. But Ialso am a realist. There is no way that the price difference in the 5.0 is PURELYindicative of the difference in manufacturing costs. It has EVERYTHING to do with the fact that they know people will pay the extra money to be able to step on the gas and feel their internal organs float up a bit.
Now, you didn't explicitly state that you think the 5.0 is overpriced, but you seem to imply some kind of fairness in this pricing scenario. Do you believe it is fair to charge more for a RAID controller than a non-RAID controller?
[thinly veiled cross flames cut]
Actually I think the abdication of responsibility is what's ruining things. What I disapprove of are attempts by people with the Neo-Conservative agenda to attempt to ruin my social democracy by gutting it of its values with threats of capital flight.
By all means, some examples...
I'm not some fresh out of Philosophy 101 Marxist.
Well, with some of the comments you've made, I'd beg to differ </jk>
You're living a pipe dream if you think this is a "Free Market".
I don't believe that Istated we are in a free market. Only something about you implying something about it.
But unlike those who think the answer is to dismantle all regulation, I have come to the conclusion that the greater threat is from what is now being termed "Corporate Welfare" or from what are becoming De-Facto monopolies and oligopolies.
Deregulation, as it has been called, has been responsble for some of the greatest end-user benefits in recent times. Rather than have [essentially] government sanctioned monopolies on utilities and services [power, cable, long distance], the effect has been to allow a "free market" [cautiously used]. Kill them all, let God sort them out [metaphorically speaking].
Now, Idon't support all deregulation. Companies run amuck are the worst kind of "free market" side effects. But the question is how you deal with the term "corporate welfare." My experience is that very few things that are termed corporate welfare promote monopoly. For example. In a nearby area, tax abatements are given to a company to build a large facillity in town. This is often termed corporate welfare by its opponents. But in NOway does this stifle competition because it is not distributed in a biased fashion [unless there is some form of corruption going on, which should be dealt with accordingly]. The oligopoly statement, I must assume, implies a form of back-pocketing of government and business. And, I am sure it happens. People are corrupt. This kind of thing happens. But instead of banning governments from being able to institute programs to encourage business, Iwould rather support VERYstrict penalties for corruption [long, uncommutable jail terms, fines, etc].
Any power can be abused. The solution is not to take them away, but to make sure they are used honorably.
Before you just write this off as a loony political rant, one of the methods that is used to exert control is as per my original post the use of artificial market barriers. What incentive is there for me to make a more functional product to service a market, when all it will take to bankrupt me is for my competitor to un-cripple their product? This reduces consumer choice, which slows the advancement of technology, which stifles progress.
Ok. So you think that this is what will happen when someone else releases an IDE-RAID device... I find that difficult to believe. Besides, if you cannot produce an equivalent product at an equivalent market price, that is not the constituent producers fault. Besides even that, what you must then propose as an alternative is governmental review of designs to make sure that no company is doing such a thing. This is clearly not an acceptable solution.
The problem with this philosophy is that it does not take into account maximum market capitalization. There is a hard upper limit on volume. If you can't produce/sell a product at a price with a respective volume, and ATLEAST break even, there is no reason to produce it. Yes, there are circumstances where this is appropriate, but there are also limits to be taken into account.
"Rather than waste any more of my time picking apart your completely incoherent argument,"
I'll leave it to others to speculate in public the reasons.
"I'll just let the truly educated readers decide for themselves."
Indeed.
Without Malice,
I don't think that the term asinine can be used "without malice..."
-Dave
Sounds like classic anti-IP dither.
People don't seem to grasp that companies like Promise PAID some engineer(s) (people like you, that read slashdot, maybe even have a stuffed penguin or two at home) to make these products. Just because they also made it cheap for them to produce doesn't make it right for you to short change them. Sure it isn't costing them money, but then again, in theory, neither is software piracy. This is NO different.
This controller is not some open-source project that none of the programmers ever expected to get cash for. This is a company that you are giving plenty of reasons to guard their designs with as much tenacity as they can muster [ie: screw open-source linux support].
Why does the fact that you have to pick up a soldering iron make this any different from you buying games off the shelf, burning copies, and then using a shrink wrap machine to return them in "original" shrink wrap?
Perhaps a better analogy would be buying a 4cyl Mustang and then stealing an engine out of one of the dealer's 5.0's and putting it in your car. I mean, the 5.0 was just sitting there out in the open for you to get at... just like the firmware...
Software RAID gives such fantabulous performance, that for a long time I couldn't understand why someone would still go for a (real, as in dedicated processor, ram) hardware controller. Then I read a post on slashdot that points out that you don't get a nice red led next to the dead drive, i.e. it takes considerably more skill to replace a disk in software-raid, and it's much easier to screw up. This alone could be reason enough for some.
As to ide, even a good software layer still can't make up for deficiencies in the hardware. My two raided UDMA maxtors can completely starve the system. True, I haven't bothered to hunt down the problem (it's just my home system), but I think it's a fair bet that it's due to the poor design of ide in general.
Long live SCSI!!
"It's better to keep your mouth shut and be thought a fool than to open it and remove all doubt."
I think you may be missing the point, this is not a $1400 DPT Millenium controller, it's an inexpensive way to increase disk throughput. I have had one of these cards for a year running on my Winblows box in stripe mode with two IDE drives and it kicks ass. Disk throughput (as reported by Echo Reporter) is exactly twice as fast as it is with a single drive of the same manufacturer. The increased disk IO performance makes a **COLOSSAL** difference in overall system performance. If you are looking for a cheap way to double (or probably quadruple with four drives) disk throughput on a Win box, this card is the solution.
Just in case Promise decides to be a biznatch and change the drivers to ruin all our modifications, I mirrored the drivers for the Ultra66 and the FastTrak66 here. No manuals though. Had to cut them because I filled up my quota posting the drivers and utils. Damned quotas...
"I threw my hands up in disgust, wondering if it had been such a good idea to have eaten my hands in the first place..."
"I threw up my hands in disgust and wondered if it had been such a good idea to have eaten my hands in the first place."
I don't think that this could be enforced but I could be wrong. It seems that copyrights have been held in force because they haven't been challenged. Reverse engineering was a big win serveral years ago but current trends in courts are to take rights away as fast as possible. The courts haven't even bothered to to hear the facts but rather listen to the big corps(they must be right because they wouldn't have gotten so big).
Case in point: Etoys vs Etoy. The judge shut the etoy website down without even waiting for a verdict even though etoy pre-existed etoys by a couple of years. Enough ranting.
>> However a flash bios isn't so. If it were, you could never flash the bios on the card, period. The fact that the a different bios than what it's chosen for really doesn't matter.
The fact that you pay for a product with the intention of cheating the company out of developement costs for a different product that you did not purchase or have the software license for dosent matter?
>> I'm reminded of the computers sold that say "Designed for Windows 98" on them. So if I install a seperate operating system on this machine does that mean I'm somehow doing something illegal? No. Of course not. The PC Manufacturer may choose to not offer support, but I have NOT done anything illegal.
Assuming you are not stealing the operating system maybe... but that doesnt fit your analogy. If you buy a PC "designed for windows 98" and then install an unlicensed burned copy of NT on it, THEN you are breaking the law. and THAT analogy more closely fits this situation.
>> As far as the idea that Promise posts the flash on it's PUBLIC ftp, but should only be used by those who purchased their card is simply put, stupid.
I'm pretty sure that every commercial software country in the world posts SOFTWARE UPDATES that are indended for the people who BOUGHT the software, why that strikes you as stupid is beyond me. I mean REALLY beyond.
>> It's a public FTP and therefor the files are public domain.
Thats not true. "Public Domain" software is not copyrighted. Promise BIOS is. The fact that you can download something does not make it Public Domain. Even LINUX is *NOT* Public Domain, you have a license granting you rights. In fact, I *DARE* you to find me a link to a commercial software site that has released its product updates as Public Domain, I DARE you.
>> You can't argue that they're allowing a person to get the files.
We're not. They put those files there in good faith. The fact that you found a way to USE software you didn't pay for but have access to nevertheless doesnt change the fact that you are using licensed software. You have only OBTAINED it legally.
>> If they didn't "allow" customers download updates, Promise would go down the tubes rather quickly.
True. But you're not a customer if you didnt buy the product. And having non-paying customers use their product is a great way to go down the tubes quickly.
>> The idea that overclocking a CPU or modifying a piece of hardware is the same as software pirating is just plain insane.
True. You can modify the hardware as you please, and its not software piracy. but, when you download software you didnt pay for and use it, its software piracy.
>> The companies are still getting money for their products, they are still making a profit. We just refused to be ripped off more than we have to be.
They are not getting any money for the BIOS you upgraded, which you are using, because you didnt BUY the fasttrack BIOS, you bought a different product with the intention of pirating unlicensed software by downloading a software update and using it as the original unpurchased product.
I find it discouraging that developers are going to see this and require click-through registrations for bios updates or driver downloads rather than have them up on their site in good faith. (have you downloaded a driver for a SoundBlaster 16 lately?) I also fear that developers will see this and become reluctant to release (more so anyway) open source software as someone will think in error that just because someone can get it, that its in the "Public Domain". This is a Bad Faith article on Slashdot, and is detrimental to the Open Source movement.
The Open Source movement is about giving to the community, not having it taken by exploiting good faith and manipulating developers software for failure to put locks and chains on it.
--AROS is an Open Source AmigaOS clone, and source compatible with AmigaOS! Try the x86 build at http://www.aros.org
3) A HW controller doesn't magically make all your disks hot swappable. Often people are happy just their system keeps running until some time where they can conveniently take it down and replace failed disks. I'm happy with that :) obviously you haven't been to the the product info page for the fasttrack66 controller, the accessory of fasttrack66 pro add hotswap caddies to the fattrack controller card. so in fact, the hardware controller does "magically" make your disks hot swappable.
hate top crosspost, but The promise fastrack pro accessory adds hotswap IDE functionality to the IDE raid. Read all the information available before telling other people the way things are.
However a flash bios isn't so. If it were, you could never flash the bios on the card, period. The fact that the a different bios than what it's chosen for really doesn't matter.
I'm reminded of the computers sold that say "Designed for Windows 98" on them. So if I install a seperate operating system on this machine does that mean I'm somehow doing something illegal? No. Of course not. The PC Manufacturer may choose to not offer support, but I have NOT done anything illegal.
As far as the idea that Promise posts the flash on it's PUBLIC ftp, but should only be used by those who purchased their card is simply put, stupid. It's a public FTP and therefor the files are public domain. You can't argue that they're allowing a person to get the files. If they didn't "allow" customers download updates, Promise would go down the tubes rather quickly.
The idea that overclocking a CPU or modifying a piece of hardware is the same as software pirating is just plain insane. The companies are still getting money for their products, they are still making a profit. We just refused to be ripped off more than we have to be.
Whereas with software pirating, companies get no profits from burned CD. At least with this, Promise is still getting my $40 bucks on a card that actually cost them $2 to make.
"You know really, this whole 'internet' thing is just a fad. Remember slap-bracelets? I mean, come on!"
We could ask the same thing of all those crazies who overclock their processors-- oh wait, I'm running dual Celeron 366s at 550.*grin*
Computing for a lot of us isn't just about getting work done or playing games, it's also about getting the most bang for the buck and seeing who can get their system to be the top dog.
"You know really, this whole 'internet' thing is just a fad. Remember slap-bracelets? I mean, come on!"
Hey everybody. Sorry about the incorrect prices I listed-- the ATA66 price I took from a friend who bought his a month ago at a local shop. And the Fasttrack price I got from pricewatch-- just the wrong card though. Oops!
Also, does anybody know if this will work with an existing onboard ATA66 (HPT) controller?
Thanks,
Spi3lb3rg (thanks to those visiting my site!!)
"You know really, this whole 'internet' thing is just a fad. Remember slap-bracelets? I mean, come on!"
How about a Beowulf cluster of these? :-)
The Acard Ultra ATA-66 PCI PnP Adapter (AEC6260) has on-board upgradable flash BIOS. Would it be possible to do the same with this card?
I wonder how the guy who did this first with the Promise card figured it out? Serendipity?
Cheap is good.
--
He lives in a world where those who do not run the client software of the omnipresent meme are unacceptable.
big difference.
stty erase ^H
If your soldering art not very well is and you nevertheless no 350 DM for a FASTTRAK66 CONTROLLER to pay wants then... Bad translation...
Long signatures suck.
Is there any soldering involved to remove the BIOS chip? From the pics, it looked like it was seated snugly in a socket..
Long signatures suck.
Though not using that hacked version, The FasTrack 66 mirroring feature is supported under linux with pdc202xx drivers. And I am using the card with Debian 2.2.14-ide kernel. However stripping mode seems not working.
>With just 4 drives, RAID 3 is the least expensive
:)
>in terms of CPU usage. It's also better if you're
>most concerned with speed, in that 3 of your
>drives will be focused solely on read/write
>operations and the 4th will dedicate itself to
>redundancy...
>
>Rather than splitting the data and redundancy
>across drives. You add many more seeks...
You may want to brush up on your raid technology
a bit.
RAID 3 is a stripe set with a dedicated parity
drive that specifies small stripes, thereby
accessing all disks in parallel.
This is fantastic if you are doing single large
I/O operations. However for most applications
this is a big mistake, as you are only performing
a single I/O operation at a time.
And then there is RAID 4, which is identical to
RAID 3, save that it uses stripes larger than
typical files.
This has the advantage that we can now perform
multiple read operations at the same time, but
we still have the single parity drive which
prevents the array from performing multiple
writes simultaneously.
This may make sense on a read intensive database.
However, if the database is static, and you are
looking for high performance, you should look at
RAID 0+1, i.e. a mirrored stripe set.
However many shops find the cost of mirroring
prohibitive. And you do take a small hit on write
operations.
And of course, our old friend RAID 5. This is the
meat and potatoes of the RAID world. Reasonably
low overhead on both reads and writes.
(As a closing note, I am kind of curious as to
where you got the impression that using RAID 3
decreased CPU overhead. The truly expensive
operation in RAID is performing the XOR, which
is common to all RAID levels, save 0, 1 and 7.
Not that this is important. In the vast majority
of scenarios you are going to run into it is the
I/O that is the bottleneck, not the processor.
And furthermore, if you are using software RAID
in a high performance environment, you are a
fool. You can pick up a dual channel midrange
DPT card with 32MB of ECC cache for around $900.)
In any case, since this was posted so late and
noone is going to read it anyways, I think I'll
shut up now.
>As for refuting software RAID because hardware is
>faster... try using a NetApp, and then tell me
>software is slow. Yep NetApp (the high-high-end
>of network-attached disk arrays) is software
>raid.
Oh dear god, this gave me a good laugh. NetApp is
"high-high end"???
First point to be made is that performance issues
are going to be masked by the fact that it access
is through an ethernet network.
You get the latency of ethernet, a free trip
through the TCP/IP protocal stack, and the NFS
driver as well.
Secondly, that they do not make a high end
solution. A 1.4TB NAS device qualifies as a
midrange product as best.
For high end you are looking at a fibre channel
SAN with something like and EMC box (up
to 10TB), an HP box (up to 10TB), an XIOtech box
(up to 3TB), a Sun StorEdge box (up to 2.6TB) or
a Compaq Storageworks box (up to 2.6TB).
>No one ever runs a NetApp off of a wire shared
>with other services.
Actually, the SMB market does. But this is
irrelevant. Repeat after me - network access has
too high a latency.
>You can go to gigabit speeds over fiber, though
>switched 100baseT is usually fine for file access
Repeat after me - network access has too high a
latency.
>Databases tend to run faster on a NetApp than
>local disks
Bullshit. Plain and simple. Maybe this is true in
NetApps marketing department, but not in the real
world.
High-end databases tend to run best with raw,
asynchronous I/O on top of a raw disk. *NOT* on
a network attached filesystem.
>EMC is good, but if you've got, say, a farm of a
>half-dozen or more file or Web servers that all
>need to see the same filesystem, NetApp is the
>cleanest way to go
True, and if this is the market go ahead and use
them. But its just plain ridiculous to claim
that they represent the high high end of storage
solutions.
Matthew
I'd like you to code a program that does better :P
o ps' law: Nothing ever gets built on time or within budget.
------------------------------------------
Che
Love's like playing "Marvel Vs. Capcom" with the default Dreamcast controller: Lots of fun but it hurts l
I bet you can keep on stacking the cards up too, until you run out of IRQs...
yep, having four ultra66 cards in a box here at work, so gives 8 disks and 8 channels... And I'm telling ya, it's pretty fast for no real money... remo
hardware RAID is always going to be better than host-based (software) RAID.
that only holds as long as cost is not part of you're evaluation.
If you're having a very ristricted budget then software raid might very well beat hardware raid by lenghts....
remo
Now I'm doing poor man's disk mirroring with rdist.
musta be kidding?????
Ever heard about Software Raid????
if not go and get yourself the Software Raid howto...
remo
This is a good idea, but I wonder how the guy figured it out in the first place? Maybe this is a deal with promise, and then they'll come up with a chip upgrade that will only work on the regulare raid controllers, that would suck! I have an older promise66 in my computer, but I ain't gona screw with it, 1. its YourWare from gateway 2. Its my moms system to, She'd burn me I screwed it up 3. I'm waiting for raid built into to a motherboard, and operates at hardware level, so that even the bios knows not that its a raid device. 4. Uh, I ran out of ideas AS Einstein say=
I did, but I use socket strips... they come on a large roll, and there is no material connecting the two strips. I'm not sure weather the support arm on a socket would block the resistor.
3) Ever seen a hotswap IDE disk? I haven't
If there is a hotswap IDE, then I apologise in advance for my knowledge gap, but SCSI RAID more often than not allows hotswap.
Apology accepted. A number of companies have put out hotswap IDE solutions. One of them, in fact, had hard drives (standard, but in a spiffy sled), LS-120, and ZIP, all ATAPI, all hotswap.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
>So your going to spend 2+ hours trying to rig up this *IDE* RAID controller to save $40? Sounds like a story for www.overclockerlamerz.com, not slashdot.
What a boring person - I guess you have no hobbies at all then, because they are all a waste of time, and for overclockerlamerz, huh?
Plain old Boring. I'd rather talk to a tree than talk to someone who thinks hobbies are a waste of time. Electronics is a hobby to most people into computer hardware...
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
>It would work with even EIGHT controllers.
Ooops, I meant EIGHT ports, or FOUR controllers.
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
Charge $35 for the RAID card and drop the other one.
Now you get even more money than before, because you have one heck of a product, that everyone wants (at that price, wow!), that is only $35.
Nahhhh, couldn't happen...
(I don't know ecenomics, before you flame...)
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
>And since there is normally only 2 IDE channels in a box, your RAID would be kinda limited...
:-)
...) The 25 MB/s transfer rate you are seeing is actually the HD limit. Even though the interface can sustain 33 MB/s, the HD is not as fast. 12.5 MB/s is actually pretty good for a HD.
Maybe in _your_ box...
You can get IDE controllers in tertiary and quaternary fashion. I hear PCI IDE controllers (like this Promise model) will automatically select tertiary and quaternary modes if you don't disable the ones already in your computer.
I bet you can keep on stacking the cards up too, until you run out of IRQs...
>IDE controllers are brain-dead. They do absolutely nothing and rely on the CPU to do everything.
Isn't that just for the old PIO modes? I might not be right here, though.
> DMA33 is actually 33 MB/s (hence the name
Well, this is good. If what I think is true above (ie: the PIO modes are the only processor intensive ones) then this means that a UDMA hard drive is going to run at peak performane.
Woohoo!
And hey, even if you don't buy extra cards, and use 2 drives on each controller, you are still fufilling the original idea of RAID - *Redundant* Array of Inexpensive Disks. So if one breaks, no problem, you might not even notice!
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
Maybe I don't have a clue, but can't you do hotswap using HD trays? I know mine powers down the drive before you can remove it (you need to unlock the key), and even if I do this with the system on - Linux doesn't seem to care.
I haven't ever tried putting it back in while the power was still on. Would it work? Or would I ruin the drive? I'm sure the replacement would have to be identical to the original.
It still works after I've powered it down while the system was live, so who knows?
Anyone with some junk around care to try?
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
>IANAL but you've got it a little backwards. The copyright is automatically granted to the creator on creation of the IP.
That's what I said:
"Copyright, which technically applies to everything under today's law"
Ok, so I didn't say by default. But I did say that it applies to everything - which is basically the same thing (I am wrong though - you are allowed to place stuff into the public domain if you say so specifically).
Copyright only governs the fact you aren't allowed to make copies of the work. It works the same for software by default as for books. ie. You _are_ technically even allowed to modify it by default (just as you are allowed to write in a book). That is why the license agreement denies you those rights.
I don't see a license agreement within ten miles of this software.
>Also, they didn't give you a copy. They put it in a public place. You still had to download a copy. Without them putting up a license agreement you don't have the right to do anything with their code. The default ownership including use rights is still theirs unless they say otherwise.
Yeah - I'm not allowed to modify the code. But I'm not doing that. I'm going to let it run as usual, without modifications.
>The ease of theft argument is kind of like saying it isn't robbery if I rob your house when you don't lock the door.
That argument would be different if it applied to this website:
It is more like Promise leaves the door open, puts a sign above it saying "Free stuff inside for your fasttrack controller, come and take some. Just open the door." Is that stealing? It says the stuff is only for a Fasttrack controller, but it doesn't say "You may not get any of this free stuff unless you have a Fasttrack controller". That's what both the website and the software are missing.
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
>Exactly. Until you run out of IRQs. I have never heard of more then 4 IDE controllers in a box, and even that is kind of a stretch.
:-)
Well - a server isn't going to have a sound card, or have serial ports enabled, or have the parallel port enabled, or any other "bonus" stuff, except for network cards. So lets see:
2 network cards - IRQ 2,3
4 Fasttrack controllers (8 ports) - IRQ 4,5,7,10,11,12,14,15
Hey, hey! It would work with even EIGHT controllers. That should be enough for any server...
>Well, DMA does offload CPU somewhat, but it's still not SCSI. SCSI offloads *all* the I/O work from the CPU. The UDMA HDs sure will work at peak performance (since the 33MB/s the UDMA33 can provide is usually at least twice as fast as HDs can sustain), provided that they have CPU's attention.
Ok, I can't argue with that. SCSI is a faster interface all around - but sometimes a Corvette will do, when the Ferrari costs 3x as much...
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
Yeah, I'd agree too - flashing the new Fasttrak BIOS over the Ultra BIOS is _possibly_ piracy.
But for it to _really_ be piracy Promise has to do one of these things:
- Not provide the software free of charge to anyone (I downloaded the BIOS just a minute) without even asking for them to click away their rights.
This means I'm not stealing the BIOS at all.
- Add a license agreement to their software (I don't see one). Copyright, which technically applies to everything under today's law, only means that you can't give a copy of this software to someone else, by default. If the company that makes it gives you it, well, then that is legal. This is in the same vein that if an author photocopies their book for you, then that is legal. If you photocopy your copy for someone else, that isn't legal.
This means I'm not breaking any copying rules by using the BIOS, because I don't plan to give anybody else these drivers/BIOS files.
They are missing both Acceptable Use Policies and Copyright Licenses on the BIOS and on their drivers. Too bad for Promise, looks like they scrwed up.
I have their software now (which I downloaded, fair and square, and legally), and I'm going to buy one of the Ultra66 controllers tomorrow and hack it up.
We'll see if there are any AUPs or License Agreements I've missed. If so, well, I'll abide by them. Otherwise, I'm going to have a nice new, legal, fasttrack card!
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
>The product vendor is selling their IP.
:-)
Interesting argument - but I've said this before:
You don't have to agree to any agreements/licenses to download the software (BIOS and drivers) to use it. They don't even include a copyright notice (that I've seen yet, but I haven't run the BIOS exe yet). So that makes it bound by default copyright laws - ie. You can't copy your freshly downloaded BIOS/driver files to someone else. I don't beleive there are any other rules/regulations bounding the use of implicitly copyrighted software...
If you want to sell IP, then you need to protect it, not give it away without any rules. Just like you don't give away a car and come back crying the next day saying "But I want it back... I didn't mean to give it away. It was an accident, honest."
Protect the family jewels I say...
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
>You want to void your warranty and render tech support useless so you can save $40-100? How valuable is your data? Hopefully more than that.
:-).
:-)
:-)
Hahaha...
Sorry, but I have dealt with an RMA department personally (I keep getting to drop stuff off). (No, not the Promise RMA department...) They cry in despair when another AcerView monitor comes in. Why? Because getting the warranty service is like pulling teeth. And suing the company is going to cost YOU money for a $40 card. So if Promise says "No, we don't feel like.", what are you going to do? Spend $100 and 4 hours to take them to small claims court to extract $40 from them? Nope...
And, not only would I not value my data to another company's tech support (the people on the other end of the phone are nothing but very large baked potatoes - I know, I get to be one of them sometimes in my job.), but I wouldn't even value my trash to tech support. They'd find a way to spread it all over my house... (note: I'm talking about tech support in general - if you work there full time, and have a higher IQ than a baked potato, well, you are one of the lucky ones
My favourite phone tech support story revolves around me phoning iOmega about (yes, another) a click of death drive back in 96/97 (or so). After waiting 1 hour on hold, LONG DISTANCE from Canada to Utah, I finally got through. When I was all said and done, I had spent $100 on my phone bill. Let me tell you - I was VERY pleased to hear iOmega lost the class action lawsuits against them. They deserved all the beating they got for that. And now I have $5 in FREE tech support. That leaves me with only another $95 in charges waiting for me next time my (thank God I sold it) iOmega drive breaks.
And if you data is super precious, it should be backed up. And if it is that precious, why are you going the cheap route and using IDE RAID anyways?
I'd say that there isn't any reason at all not to hack up the Ultra66 card, IMHO.
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
Clip out the plastic support on the socket that would cover that resistor first.
:-)
The socket will still work. I'd suggest machined, they only cost a buck more, and fit like a glove.
>Honestly, did you read the article?
>Nice suggestion...
Did you look at the pictures in the article? Guess what is on either side of the resistor (and the blank pads) that this guy has installed as a "aftermarket" upgrade...
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
Forget about the Controller card. It's cheap and not HOT SWAP. Me and a friend have been slavering over a product called an ARENA99 I found at http://www.dirtcheapdrives.com Now if I can convince myself that an ide-raid enclosure is worth the money I'll be in heaven
For me, this only took about 10 minutes to do, and to me, it's definitely worth saving 40 bucks...... and it works perfectly fine.
Beware false economy.
...phil
...phil
"For a list of the ways which technology has failed to improve our quality of life, press 3."
I'm curious to understand the bizarre logic that makes you think this.
The 'crippled' $20 product is a means to sell only a portion of their intellectual property. For $20 you get the benefit of their ATA66 R&D effort. For $65 you get the benefit of that plus the RAID R&D effort. This ability to charge incrementally for development effort is probably key to the profitability of the product line as a whole.
How they package that intellectual property is irrelevant. It simply turns out that it's cheaper to disable the RAID stuff than it is to fab two entirely different products.
>If you've ever found yourself wanting a third hand while solderinge
:)
:)
>then you're probably not a hacker.
If you've never soldered anything where a third hand would have been *really*
useful, then you're just not ambitious enough.
Soldering wimp!
With a soldering iron, yellow stickies, duct tape, and a couple of
bungies, you can fix *anything*
Hmm, I've never considered myself a hacker, but I guess that last line
kind of defines me as one, doesn't it?
hawk
until it's drawn blood . . . And my latest (hmm, two years old???) managed to do it before I got the motherboard . . . My uncle & cousin wanted to see it, so I brought it in from the trunk.
:)
OK, it's also that my Uncle reads & writes ancietn egyptian, and I wanted the label that read "Hawkins"
- Re: your performance problems. Are you using the 0.9 RAID patch (and appropriate RAID-utils)? It's much better.
- Software RAID for SCSI IMHO is better than Software RAID for IDE. It works great on my system. Perhaps the problem is with your controller?
- 2.3.3x's standard RAID is different from 2.2.14, I think... Somewhere in the recent 2.3.x tree the 0.9 RAID patches were applied.
I use Software RAID over my UW-SCSI controller, and I'm telling you, it ROCKS!sigs are a waste of space
No matter how many times I read this, I can't make it make sense. Did you mean "If you've never..." or what?
Of course, maybe my inexperience with soldering is showing...
-----
The real meaning of the GNU GPL:
The real meaning of the GNU GPL:
"The Source will be with you... Always."
If you've ever found yourself wanting a third hand while soldering then you're probably not a hacker.
You know, that is a cool saying. Mainly because it's got SO many different interpretations, but also because almost all of them are SO false.
I'm sure you meant the last one I listed. I sorta like the other two.
-Billy
Hmm, 600MHz Pentim III, 128Mb of RAM and cheap 18Gb 5400rpm IDE drives.
Anyone else see the problem with this picture?
Especially when you're going to be wasting 6 million cycles waiting for I/O.
10/15K rpm SCSI drives. Can't use ATA interface drives.
Deleted
Think about it for a second: The overhead imposed on your CPU when doing software RAID is something like going thru one extra layer in the FS-> VFS-> block device-> (RAID)-> buffer/cache-> device chain. It's something like 30 extra lines of C code (give and take). This is just _not_ going to make your CPUs peg to 100%. Something else must have been doing this to you, I don't know what, but I've _never_ heard anyone report this. For the record my own box with 4 4.5G IBM SCSI disks do 30+ MB/s sustained transfers on RAID-0. For me the speed limit is here because of crappy memory bandwith on the aging PPro system.
SW RAID should work with IDE, SCSI, and any combination you please. Your experience sounds pretty strange.
If you didn't patch the 2.2.14 kernel and didn't use an -ac patch, then you've been running the old RAID code. This is inferior to the 0.90 code available as patches, but RAID-0 performance should be comparable. My guess is something else in your setup caused this CPU hogging. If it's just misconfiguration of the RAID, it's pretty interesting as I've seen noone else hitting the problem you describe.
1) Software on a PII is slower than software on an i960 or i486 or M68something ? That's a new one... :)
2) The Linux kernel has excellent caching techniques. Besides, it uses your main memory for caching, so you get the benefit of having a dynamically sized cache, adapting to your needs at any given time
3) A HW controller doesn't magically make all your disks hot swappable. Often people are happy just their system keeps running until some time where they can conveniently take it down and replace failed disks. I'm happy with that
4) No serious sysadmin is going to use anything but csh and a Sparc5. But for the rest of us, the better performing, more flexible, and cheeper solution is definitely something that shouldn't just be ignored.
5) You can build nice RAID-5 sets with IDE, just buy a few extra IDE controllers, use only one disk per bus (to keep good performance), and you're off.
The point of RAID without hotswap is saving you a night of reinstalling and restoring backups. You will have to take the system down to replace the disk, but you can do this at a convenient time. That's worth a lot to many of us. And remember this is often at the price of one extra disk.
You know your a hacker when...
you don't mind soldering over your lap when wearing only shorts.
Once again, I am not a RAID guru, but even I can see that you are obviously wrong here.
...) The 25 MB/s transfer rate you are seeing is actually the HD limit. Even though the interface can sustain 33 MB/s, the HD is not as fast. 12.5 MB/s is actually pretty good for a HD.
1. IDE controllers are brain-dead. They do absolutely nothing and rely on the CPU to do everything. That was the intent of the design -- to make it as cheap as possible. They sure have achieved that, and it works rather well for desktops I must say. In and of itself it is not necessarily bad, but see #3.
2. DMA33 is actually 33 MB/s (hence the name
3. (most important) Only *one* IDE HD per channel can work at a time. This means that if you have 2 HDs attached to the same IDE channel (i.e. master & slave), only *one* of them at a time will actually be able to transfer data. The second one will have to wait. Therefore, this defeats the whole point of RAID -- concurrency. The only way you can have concurrent reads/writes is if you connect 2 HDs to 2 different IDE channels. And since there is normally only 2 IDE channels in a box, your RAID would be kinda limited...
On the other hand, with SCSI you can connect up to 15 devices to one SCSI controller and have them *all* operate concurrently.
So, my conclusion is that, while software RAID may actually be a viable alternative to hardware RAID (as some people claim), IDE RAID is simply not suited for the job.
___
___
If you think big enough, you'll never have to do it.
Exactly. Until you run out of IRQs. I have never heard of more then 4 IDE controllers in a box, and even that is kind of a stretch.
Well, this is good. If what I think is true above (ie: the PIO modes are the only processor intensive ones) then this means that a UDMA hard drive is going to run at peak performane.
Well, DMA does offload CPU somewhat, but it's still not SCSI. SCSI offloads *all* the I/O work from the CPU. The UDMA HDs sure will work at peak performance (since the 33MB/s the UDMA33 can provide is usually at least twice as fast as HDs can sustain), provided that they have CPU's attention.
___
___
If you think big enough, you'll never have to do it.
I have heard lots of times (even here on /.) frases like "avoid software RAID like the plague". Is the overhead really that small? Also, I understand that Linux does support some hardware RAID controllers (I heard Mylex something or other mentioned).
Could somebody else please comment on the issue? As you can see my knowledge RAID is quite limited.
___
___
If you think big enough, you'll never have to do it.
Umm.. ahem. It's pretty funny to see all these people arguing about why you should use this or software RAID from Linux when they are the same thing. Think about it - if you can flash the controller's BIOS into suddenly being a RAID controller, then something must be happening in software. I've never heard of a BIOS flash that actually creates a whole new processor right onboard. Hardware RAID always, always costs more than a hundred bucks. If you don't believe me, may I suggest Pricewatch. The extra money you pay is for a dedicated on-board processor. The FastTrack don't got one; it relies on the host processor just as much as Linux kernel RAID does. I'm not sure which is faster, but I guess they'd be comparable. So just choose one and pick it - if you're like me you'll pick the free solution, but whatever.
--
I think there is a world market for maybe five personal web logs.
How do you explain RAID 1 then? Both redundancy and striping, and a lot more cost effective: combining two 4.5gb 10000 RPM drives (assuming such a beast existed) into a logical drive with half the seek time and twice the throughput would be a lot, lot cheaper than buying a 20000 RPM drive with no failover. I realize they don't even exist, and I think (?) that's the whole point of RAID: obtaining a logical drive that works a lot, lot faster than anything on the market today, and doing it at a cost that would be much cheaper than obtaining some sort of prototype or whatever. If a RAID guru would like to jump in here, feel free.
--
I think there is a world market for maybe five personal web logs.
Hotswap really isn't the commodity people make it out to be. I find that those who decry software RAID because you can't hotswap often are the same people who bought EDO DRAM over FPM, etc. - they don't really see a difference or know why they are paying extra money, except that it's the "right thing to do." The reality is that very, very few people can actually justify spending several hundred dollars on a hardware hotswap RAID controller because they can't tolerate more than a few minutes downtime. Furthermore, a lot people equate hotswap with the ability to rebuild a crashed drive. This is fallacy - one is inherent to RAID 5, the other isn't. You can rebuild a crashed drive using software RAID 5, but you have to open the case and replace a drive. BFD.. most people don't need hotswappability. Software RAID is fine.
--
I think there is a world market for maybe five personal web logs.
It's all a matter of perspective. I can go out and buy a one terabyte RAID array right now. I cannot go out and buy a one terabyte hard drive. In fact, a one terabyte hard drive would could so much to produce in terms of physical medium (platters and heads) that it would be cost prohibitive versus stringing a bunch of "cheap" Cheetah 18LP hard drives together. That's the whole idea behind RAID - string a bunch of cheaper disks together to make one really, really big disk, which, in some cases, even if it could actually be made (like the 1TB), would cost exponentially more.
--
I think there is a world market for maybe five personal web logs.
One to hold the iron, one to hold the solder, and one to position the work. Sometimes I'll clamp the iron between some books and hold the work and solder, and sometimes bend a piece of solder so it's hangin in the air and hold the iron and the work. The real solution is get a 'panavise' to position the work. A not recomended solution is the hold the solder in your mouth. If your working on the floor sometimes you can hold the iron between your toes. There were a few irons available that had the roll of solder right on them - just press a button and it feeds some to the tip!
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
Companies just want to have fun - no, to have thick profit margins - they do this by reducing their production costs and NOT passing the savings on to you, the consumer, unless a competitor threatens to.
One big F500 company I know of had an 8-bit device with 16K of memory. Customers could buy memory upgrades for it by having a tech come out and plug in another row of mem-chips, customer paid for parts and labor. Well time went on and they found it cheaper to just make all the boards with 64K chips but they only enabled 16K. Now the customer had to pay the same damn fee to 'add more memory', but now all the tech did was come out and pull a jumper.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
Your issue there is that FlashPoint RAID cards aint RAID cards.
AMI Megaraid is a RAID card. Mylex DAC960 is a RAID card. Flashpoint, is a scsi card with some firmware bits and pieces to help along a software RAID system.
FWIW, there are any number of two channel UW-SCSI AMI Megaraid 428 cards on the surplus market at about $150. They rock, and have full linux support.
This is just like television, only you can see much further.
i have had bad, Bad, BAD experiences with software raid in production environments!
I had 1 of 4 drives in a raid 5 array using the 0.90 drivers go bad. When it went bad, it locked up the scsi bus long enough that the raid driver decided that another drive must also be bad.
So i had one drive down and another drive tagged as desynched. This resulted in Total Loss of Data. There was no way to make it rebuild. I tried everything the people on the mailing list could think of.
My fault for not having backups. Shame on me.
BUT. The speed allegations are pretty false. A *good* hardware RAID card with on-board hardware cacheing beats the tar out of software raid. Up to 4x the sustained throughput.
This is just like television, only you can see much further.
RAID 1 is the most reliable configuration you can have, in that fully 50% of your storage space is devoted to redundancy. However, if you're needing speed above all else, I'd say go with either RAID 3 or 5...
With just 4 drives, RAID 3 is the least expensive in terms of CPU usage. It's also better if you're most concerned with speed, in that 3 of your drives will be focused solely on read/write operations and the 4th will dedicate itself to redundancy... Rather than splitting the data and redundancy across drives. You add many more seeks...
I'm not sure what your end goal is... I'm thinking you're looking at something like video editting where throughput means everything compared to anything else. If you're already doing a lot of seeks - database operations - go with RAID 5, as it's more easily expandable.
-----
As a finaly note, if you're going to invest in new drives, you may want to check the newest 10,000 RPM drives... The added RPM's plus the increased density of the tracks means that they're easily more than 150% faster...
By a friend mailto:(bp@nrw-online.de) I was brought on the idea
it by Internet admits to give thereby also different POWER to USERS those
Likewise by it like fast one has itself to amuse possibility its computer STILL
wars can.
Honestly, what in God's name is he trying to tell us here?
Other than that though, groovey discovery.
Do you remember the original description of RAID?
;-)
Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks
I don't see SCSI, Fibre Channel, or 3+ disks requirement there anywhere.
With SCSI it started to mean more like Independent Disks, and you got the features like the so-called "hot swap".
IDE drives are certainly inexpensive, and there should be no reason not to set them up in a RAID configuration.
Why not setup 2 IDE drives in Raid level 1 (Mirror)? No one is required to setup Raid level 5 on their box.
If you ask me, that is quite a usable configuration, the odds of both IDE drives dying at the same time are slim.
Let RAID stand for what it once stood!
P.S. If you are wondering, I use DataDirect Enterprise 8 and Mylex RAID hardware in my datacenter.
--
Leonid S. Knyshov
Network Administrator
Leonid S. Knyshov
Find me on Quora
Before I will try messing with the card, I would first like to see it work correctly in my system. I got one about 4 months ago, but I have not gotten it to recognize the drive. The system sees the card and I can use the drive with the motherboard's regular ide, but the promise card is being a pain.
Second point, I am not too hot on the idea of applying heat to a card. Even if it works, I could see Promise coming out with later driver updates which are tweaked to work right on their raid cards and deep-6 a tweaked card (referring to purchased OS's, not open OS's and home grown drivers) . This is too new a card. There will be a year more of bug fixes before they work everything out.
In a place beyond time and space, in a land far better than this, look for me there...
Try swallowing an anvil. Quite harmful, whatever it's made of.
Can a real RAID guru post them?
I'm not a real RAID guru, but I play one at work.
If you are putting together highly available servers, perhaps for heavy DB serving, and have money, I might agree with you.
But if you are putting together load balanced servers, such as mail, web, authentication, etc. then software RAID, even with cheapo IDE drives, kicks serious ass. Normally, you can't justify serious RAID for these boxes, but cheap software RAID/IDE means that you can add some redundancy and have an easier day. Also, if you are load balancing, you can afford the reboot to replace a drive.
At an ISP, this is the world I live in. I don't have big DB servers, but an army of smallish servers. I also have no money and no time to rebuild a server every time a drive dies. This is the best of both worlds to me...
This is a really good point, and bears reinforcement.
People forget what RAID stands for: Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks. IDE RAID is sneered at by the general hardware geek because it's crappy compared to SCSI. Well, of course it is, but you don't care, because it's RAID.
Yes, yes, you can't hot-swap most IDE, and you're limited to the number of hosts per controler, but you don't much care 'bout that either because it's just so damn cheap. If you use multiple controlers you get around most of the limitations of IDE anyhow, so adding an extra controler for the additional disks is a no-brainer. As for hot-swap, you can just keep a hot-spare in the case. That way you can bring it on line in case of a failure and you don't go down unless two disks fail before you can schedule down-time to replace one. Linux RAID doesn't do this sort of hot-spare thing automatically that I know of, but it certainly is easy enough to hack together.
As for refuting software RAID because hardware is faster... try using a NetApp, and then tell me software is slow. Yep NetApp (the high-high-end of network-attached disk arrays) is software raid.
Speaking of which, when is someone going to write a one-step online backup system for ext2fs (or ext3fs) like the one on the NetApp. Basically it's a copy-on-write setup where the root inode is coppied, and every write to a block causes it to be coppied and every inode above it to be coppied. Thus an online backup can be done in seconds, allowing applications like databases to be brought down for practically no time (0 time, if you're using Oracle).
There are almost certainly patent problems here, but someone should at least research how close to this one could get before stepping on patented toes....
- No one ever runs a NetApp off of a wire shared with other services
- You can go to gigabit speeds over fiber, though switched 100baseT is usually fine for file access
- Databases tend to run faster on a NetApp than local disks
- EMC is good, but if you've got, say, a farm of a half-dozen or more file or Web servers that all need to see the same filesystem, NetApp is the cleanest way to go
I don't have any stake in NetApp (though I kick myself for not buying stock), I just love their product.Hehehehe...
Seriously though, I can't even begin to imagine the long-term effects of half of the toxic substances I used have to deal with my job. Between the pot of boiling lead for tinning wires and carcinogenic chemicals we used to watch the resin off the boards, I don't believe I want to know what my anticipated life expectancy is.
Lucky for me, I am now dealing with components only after they've been assembled, the toxic residue of the computer industry being confined to poor people in countries far away from us.
Note: The above is sarcasm.
"How perfectly Goddamn delightful it all is, to be sure" Charles Crumb
Well, don't know if I'm a "real hacker"...I suspect I solder far too well to be a hacker. Most of the electronics hackers I've known had the soldering skills of a chimp on acid. I can say this because I used to build all the one-offs and production prototypes for a company. The hacked piles of wires and chips that I got to work from were rife with cold joints, globbed solder, etc.
But you do eventually learn to hold more than two things with two hands...holding a coil of solder in the fingers of the same hand that holds the soldering iron, holding the board and a pair of plyers with the other hand.
"How perfectly Goddamn delightful it all is, to be sure" Charles Crumb
Actually, the article says the only difference is an SMD resistor and the BIOS. Sucks that they hid it UNDER the BIOS chip though.
Best new white rapper since Pimp Daddy Welfare... Pimp-T!
I spent the last 6 months working on a FibreChannel RAID adapter. It could also be run in direct connect mode. I can tell you that with any OS the raid on the controller could always beat the host based software raid. External raid (raid boxes of storage with no controller) are around the same speed, perhaps better under big loads. Software raid really doesn't make sense. All the extra time spent in raid calculations wastes host CPU which could be better spent running the database, web server, etc. Under heavy loads, software raid starts to either effect the rest of the system or vice-versa. Offloading RAID processing on to a controller or external storage system that has dedicated processors is the best solution. Think about video cards...you could do the work on the host processor but why? Host processors are for general, non specific tasks. For specific tasks (only raid, only video, only tcp/ip) that do not change much over time, offloading is a good idea.
-- soldack
Hey folks, the FastTrack66 is not a raid at all. It is a software raid card, but implemented in the ON BOARD BIOS.
For the uninitiated, just because software is stored on a chip (in this case the card bios) rather than a disk, does not make it "hardware". This is commonly referred to as "firmware" but in reality is software that runs on the host CPU just like any piece of software.
I'd be interested to see where you get this information from - as far as I can tell, the flashable bios on the card is run ONLY by the onboard controller; it is not downloaded to the CPU at all......
--
-=DaveHowe=-
It doesn't need to be "downloaded" to the CPU. It simply exists in memory space. Yes, I know that - but as far as I know, the part of the flash upgrade that gives you Raid rather than standard SCSI is running on the onboard processor, not the host machine - after all, this is the whole point of having SCSI in the first place - to offload disk I/O from the host CPU to the Card.
However, I was more interested in where you got your analyis from - do you have the source to the thing someplace on the web? I don't have one of these cards, so can't really check locally....
--
-=DaveHowe=-
Is expended already - yes, it is reasonable to price your product to cover research costs in x years, and still make a profit, but not quite so reasonable to try and make you pay a premium for features that should be standard. If they weren't making a profit *and* working towards breakeven at the $20 pricepoint, they wouldn't be selling at that price at all. So the price difference of $45 is pure profit - due to what amounts to a lie about how much improvement you are getting over the $20 card.
Should Promise be punished for engineering the card so that it could be modified to be a simple ATA controller? Is their $65 price point exhorbitant?
No, it's a marketing tactic - the Raid controller market is profitable at $65, the Standard ATA controller market wouldn't be, so they sell at $20 - this does'nt mean the $65 is an unreasonable price for that market, it means the market AS A WHOLE is artificially high-priced.
--
-=DaveHowe=-
To me, the more notable thing is that you can buy a RAID controller for $65... the ability to get it in a clandestine manner for $20 instead is not as interesting, IMHO.
Not really - the point is that the Cheaper card IS the same as the more expensive one, with features disabled so they can charge a higher price for the one with raid. It's not the first time this has happened, and it won't be the last, but they have no reason not to be selling the raid-enabled card for the $20 and forgetting the poor-brother mode one......
--
-=DaveHowe=-
Was this page posted by a friend of Mahir, the "I kiss you" guy? The English sounds familiar.
-- Ryan
What, is today's generation wussified? When I was a kid we used to play with screwdrivers and B&W TV flyback transformers.. I vaguely remember poking a Ann Arbor terminal with a pen-knife once.. After waking up, I didn't have much of a Wenger or much desire to do it again..
Wait.. I'm only 22, and I was a psychotic. The 112vac squirt gun proves that..Hmm.. The voltage must have fried a couple of braincells.
.sig: Now legally binding!
It all depends on the hardware/software in question. Having not played with software RAID recently, I defer judgement on speed. But hardware RAID has a few advantages over software.
Most notably, you're offloading a processing chore from the CPU, which will make the main CPU more available. It also means that the RAID controller can do 'background' chores, like verifying the volumes when no accesses are pending, rebuilding a volume after a disk failure (assuming the RAID set has redundancy).
But I wouldn't knock IDE RAID for hobbyists: IDE disks are cheaper, and there is a performance boost. And most implementations (I believe this is true for FasTrack66) fool the OS into thinking the RAID set is just a plain ol' IDE hard disk!
And the main point: will software RAID be better than no RAID at all (for the very cost-conscious)? In a reasonable implementation, the answer should be yes.
Perhaps it warrants another look then. I didn't make note of what version of the raid patches I was using, I didn't have anything to compare it to as it was my first time. ;-) My controller is a Symbios Logic 53c875.
25% Funny, 25% Insightful, 25% Informative, 25% Troll
Not that this is germane to the the ATA66 controller in question, but in my experience software RAID ranges from unusable to suicide-inducing. I laid out substantial funds to get myself twin 4.5gb seagate cheetahs, planning to stripe them. Well, it was so enormously slow that I couldn't stand to use it. When opening the gimp, for instance, both processors pegged to 100%. Is there some reason that software raid shouldn't be used for SCSI ? For the record, this was in kernel 2.2.14, and when I tried it in 2.3.3x (whatever was current at the time) I couldn't even get the drives mountable.
25% Funny, 25% Insightful, 25% Informative, 25% Troll
Can the raid controller also give the same functionality as the ATA66 because the components are so similar?
Slashdot social engineering at it's finest
Is the BIOS limitation why the newer geForce cards won't work on older mobos (well, older than the Athlon boards out now) with the VIA chipset?
Esperandi
Just bought an Athlon, new mobo, and geForce card... made sure I got one with the AMD bridges and NO VIA!
Here's what I got when I did a Babelfish Eng->Ger, Ger->Eng to it:
Just as by it you fast have may maintain possibility which its wars of the computer can do STILL.
Not much better =)
Pablo Nevares, "the freshmaker".
Pablo Nevares, "the freshmaker".
So your going to spend 2+ hours trying to rig up this *IDE* RAID controller to save $40? Sounds like a story for www.overclockerlamerz.com, not slashdot.
...from the article:
"Likewise by it like fast one has itself to amuse possibility its computer STILL wars can."
I think that's impressive!
Stupidity is mis-underestimated.
But seriously, I think it sucks that a company can sell two identical products, with the only difference being 1 resistor is moved and a different BIOS, and more than triple the price for one of them.
kwsNI
and IBM invented it. IBM had a printer device in the 1950's that was rated for a certain number of lines per minute and leased (no, you're not allowed to buy computers) for a certain amount per month. This model was "field upgradable" to another model which printed twoce as fast, but leased for twice as much. To do a "field upgrade" a tech would go to the site and replace two parts. One was the label with the model number and the other was a pulley half the diameter of the one it replaced. (My source? Some huge book about IBM and the Watsons.)
Lexmark (the descendant of the IBM printer division) pulled the same stunt later on when it had two models of laser printer that differed only in the value in a certain location in the ROM.
Anomalous: inconsistent with or deviating from what is usual, normal, or expected
Anomalous: deviating from what is usual, normal, or expected
Canard: a false or unfounded repor
Doing things for absolutely no useful reason is what these little machines we all love are all about. Never forget that.
If you've ever found yourself wanting a third hand while soldering then you're probably not a hacker.
No reason! Sheesh. How about the R&D effort expended on the RAID capability? Should Promise be punished for engineering the card so that it could be modified to be a simple ATA controller? Is their $65 price point exhorbitant?
The cost of the parts for ANY piece of computer hardware is next to nil. The only thing that makes any hardware expensive is the R&D effort expended designing it. It doesn't strike me as unreasonable for them to charge extra for the ability to take advantage of the RAID capability.
Old habits die hard I guess. I stopped counting the number of times people in disbelief have seen Software RAID wipe the floor with their HW solution, performance wise. Drop by the linux-raid list (archives eventually) and see for yourself some day.
Even if we agree that it's not for production (I don't agree, but let's assume so for a second) you still didn't want to use your hand-patched ATA/66 card for production either now, did you ?
If you want to swap systems, SW RAID is just as fine. Swap the disks and the other system will boot on them as well. Wether they're attached to a SCSI controller with RAID capability or not makes no difference. The other system will see the volumes too, the configuration doesn't change magically when moved from one system to the other...
IDE lacks hotswap capability, that's why it's often considered a bad idea. But compare it to a production server _without_ RAID, and suddenly it's one hell of a lot better. You can take the machine down some time convenient, and you won't be reinstalling and restoring backups all night.
That link is bad too.. Doesn't work for me anyway.
Z IP
After a little searching, here's the post that you mentioned, and YES this way is a lot easier.
---Begin Crosspost---
Ok, I know this sounds crazy, it is.
This is how you do it...(see link)
http://www.geocities.com/promise_raid/
I know this is in danish and most of you don't understand anything of it.
Look at the pictures.
I'll translate for you guys, because I like you (LOL!)
Goals:
1: Update the card's BIOS
2: Solder a 100 Ohms resistor from pin 23 to ground, OR from pin 23 to 16.
3: Enjoy your new el-cheapo RAID system
IT IS VERY IMPORTANT THAT YOU UPDATE YOUR BIOS BEFORE YOU SOLDER!!!
Things required:
A Promise UDMA66 controller
A 100 Ohms resistor
A soldering iron, soldering tin, and a screwdriver.
Detailed walk-through:
Buy a Promise UMDA66 controller
Buy a 100 Ohms resistor (color code: brown-black-brown)
Check if the card works as an UDMA66 controller
Format a 3 1/4 inch 1.44MB diskette, make it bootable (copy system files under windows format)
On this diskette you place the BIOS update program and the new BIOS, find the bios on:
www.promise.com
(it is the one for the RAID device you have to download)
Boot on this diskette
Start the BIOS program:
A:\ptiflash.exe
FIRST TAKE A BACKUP OF YOUR CURRENT BIOS!!!
Choose option no.1 and choose where you want to save your current BIOS.
Flash your BIOS with the one you just downloaded, do this by selecting option no.2 and write the name of your new downloaded BIOS (normally A:\ft66b108.bin)
Restart your computer
When you restart, you will get an error when your computer begins to initialize the IDE-66 controller's BIOS.
Shut your computer down
Pull out the Controller card
Unscrew the metal plate from the controller. (this makes it easier to handle)
Solder the resistor on pin no. 23 (see the picture on the website I linked to, you will see it clearly)
BE VERY CAREFUL WHEN YOU SOLDER!! The bios is much sensitive to heat, so if your card has an IC socket they recommend you to remove it.
Now you can put back the metal plate, put the card back and power your computer on.
Hopefully it will work, and by pressing Ctrl-F you can go into a program where you can easily select which RAID mode you want to run.
Link to bios flash program and BIOS update
http://www.geocities.com/promise_raid/FT66b108.
NOTE!!! I cannot be held responsible to any damage or failure of your system or the card itself or any living person walking around you, you are on your own!
------------------
Uffe Merrild
------------------------
editor at Hiphardware.com
---End Crosspost---
---
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Ahh, love these little hacks.
Friend of mine showed me the difference between some low-end radar detector and the higher-up model by adding in a 10 cent light.
Remember a friend of mine modifying my caller ID unit to hold twice as many numbers, with a method similar(no bios flashing tho) to the RAID controller.
I got a FastTrak66 for $59, thanks to Fry's for putting the wrong price sticker on the box!
Unfortunately there is no Linux driver for the FT66 (and promise will not give a delivery date), so I downgraded the card to an Ultra 66. Just move a resistor to a different jumper and flash the bios. Now I'm doing poor man's disk mirroring with rdist. Wish I could have hardware raid though...
No formal IDE hotswap outside of 'IDE' flashcards.. I've tried it (cloning solution), the only safe way involved a pair of fast-latch 20 pole switches and a powersupply modified for variable voltage..
I burned out eighteen 120meg Connor's that weekend..
.sig: Now legally binding!
I am going to go out and buy all the parts and give it a whirl. At the worst, I'm out a few bucks. At the best, I've found a way to save s pretty chunk of change for my boss...
So how song do you think until they change the manufacturing process to break this?
--
Matt Singerman
Matt Singerman
http://matt.vegan.net/
You want to void your warranty and render tech support useless so you can save $40-100? How valuable is your data? Hopefully more than that.
I am not a lawyer.
Okay, a few reason Software RIAD and IDE RIAD is a bad idea.... 1) Software is slower and not as reliable. 2) Hardware RAID usually has excellent caching techniques 3) Ever seen a hotswap IDE disk? I haven't 4) No serious sys admin is going to use a software solution. It would almost certainly be a lesser quality hardware. 5) If your going to RAID 5, you need at least three disks. Bit of a worry when you have only two disks per IDE chain. And just for empasis - what is the point of RAID fi you cant hotswap. If there is a hotswap IDE, then I apologise in advance for my knowledge gap, but SCSI RAID more often than not allows hotswap.
"Old Rallydrivers never die - they just fail to book in on time"
It loads the program out of a Flash ROM instead of a hard disk, and the routine is called from an interrupt hook instead of an OS kernel function, but those are the only fundemental differences.
A "Hardware" RAID would use its own processor. There is none on the FastTrak.
What FastTrak gives you is software RAID 0/1 for OS's that don't offer it. If you run Linux or NT, you're just as well off with the Ultra 66 controller and OS RAID functions.
Any differences in performance or reliability would be from the merits of the respective programs, not a hardware/software difference.
I have a Promise FastTrak myself, and I use it for my gaming system (Win 98), but in Win2K/Linux I get the same CPU utilization and transfer rates using two single channels and the OS raid 0.
-Ryan C.
This is the URL...
http://www.storagereview.com/welcome.pl/http://www .storagereview.com/ubb/For um1/HTML/002964.html
Odd URL huh?
The RAID techniques used by these cards are slightly different than those used by Linux. Unfortunately, this means that the RAID cards won't work with Linux unless it has specific driver support for the RAID features.
I have a Mylex FlashPoint SCSI card that had similar software RAID features. I wound up flashing the BIOS DOWN to a non-RAID BIOS because there was no support for the RAID features of the card under Linux and my mobo doesn't get along very well with cards that have 64K of onboard BIOS. (Apparently one of the worst bugs in VIA chipsets...)
So if you're a Linux user, don't get your hopes up as to being successful with this.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
correct link?
But you do eventually learn to hold more than two things with two hands...holding a coil of solder in the fingers of the same hand that holds the soldering iron, holding the board and a pair of plyers with the other hand.
Whiye knot holed the solder in yer mouthe? I no it's made uf lead butt eye doo it all het time und eye hav had know problums yet.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
Just got ours, Ultra66. Flash the bios. 100 Ohm resistor from pin 16 - 23 (Don't pull out the bios - just solder. over the top or underneath.) Reboot and sweet.
Jim.
Don't know if it'll work, but sure as anything it'll be a lot easier for newbies:
Delboy
When you remove the bios from the card, go down to radioshack and buy a socket to put it in. Then soilder that to the board and put the chip in the socket. It will save you a great deal of trouble if you mess up or need to go back to Ultra66 mode.
Go with Linux Software RAID instead, and save even more money. The 0.90 code (which works very well) is available as patches to the 2.2 series, and is currently being integrated into the 2.3 series.
This will support RAID-linear, -0, -1, -4 and -5. It will work with your ATA cards as well as with your SCSI ones. The IDE layer in Linux is stable enough to survive any disk failure I've ever seen, so stability is as good as it gets.
Besides, Software RAID solutions are usually somewhere between faster and _much_ faster than HW ones. Back in the old days it was a gain to do RAID management in software on an auxillary processor (``hardware'' RAID), but these days your average 400MHz PII won't even notice the extra workload (it's neglible to running ``top'' etc.).
Check out the HOWTO at http://ostenfeld.dk/~jakob/Software-RAID.HOWTO. It's also in the process of getting into the LDP, so we'll be nicely set up for when 2.4 hits the street.
Hey folks, the FastTrack66 is not a raid at all. It is a software raid card, but implemented in the ON BOARD BIOS.
For the uninitiated, just because software is stored on a chip (in this case the card bios) rather than a disk, does not make it "hardware". This is commonly referred to as "firmware" but in reality is software that runs on the host CPU just like any piece of software.
The only difference is of course the BIOS calls you use to access the disk are able to understand the striping used on your disk. There are basically two advantages to this.
Thus, as I said previously, it's not a raid card at all. It's got pretty much no functionality for doing for doing raid at all. Given the fact that it's advertised as a hardware raid, I'd just as soon not purchase any products from Promise at all, until they learn to quit with the false advertising.
-josh
To me, the more notable thing is that you can buy a RAID controller for $65... the ability to get it in a clandestine manner for $20 instead is not as interesting, IMHO.
You're totally wrong. ... and the moderators who moderated you up and wrong too. Please moderate this down!
I would have, but then I couldn't post.
Hardware RAID is always going to be better than host-based (software) RAID.
software raid may be neat to play with on your PC, but if you were planning a PRODUCTION server to run your business off of, you'd want a real hardware RAID box.
Also, you can dual attach a hardware RAID box, you can swap the server out from under your hardware raid box and still see the volumes.
IDE RAID is a bad idea for a number of reasons that I'm not qualified to go into, but I've heard the arguments. Can a real RAID guru post them?
And this is it. You don't have to mess around with SMD components or remove the BIOS chip.
Sorry for the dbl post, but I fscked up the last URL.