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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.
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.
It matters which RAID you want to run. I run a RAID V (5) system on my server at work, and I view it as only serving a purpose, not gaining speed. Now if you had multiple hard drives what were exactly the same size, and a RAID controller with 32mb of cache you would get a performance increase. If you are serious about performance get a real nice controller. If you want to hack some hardware try this out.
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...
Rather, I suspect that they are just replacing the DOS INT 13H (hdd control) interrupt handler with their own at system startup, and are having the main CPU do the RAID work in software. I would futhur guess that the Windows drivers for the card then do the same work in protected mode in the driver. If I am correct, then there is no advantage to using this card in its own native RAID mode vs. using software RAID.
The only advantage HW RAID gives you is that the main processor is freed up to do other tasks. In the case of a file server, there are no other tasks and therefor hardware RAID buys you very little. As others have said, SW RAID allows you to
use system memory for buffer. Your system almost certainly has more RAM than the card
Better detect, log, and correct disk errors. HW RAID tends to hide this sort of thing from the system.
use drives on different controllers. This allows you to spread your RAID array across controllers, so that a controller failure will not take the array out. Now, I could be dead wrong on the Promise not having its own CPU. If anybody out there can correct me by telling me the specs of the CPU (RAM size, type, operating speed, etc.) then I will be greatful. However, this smells to me like a WinModem, WinPrinter, software "wavetable" sound card, etc.: "We just won't tell the user his CPU is being used to do the work, and he'll be fat dumb and happy...."
www.eFax.com are spammers
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.
I have gone to the dark side and started running the 0.90 software RAID on *gasp* IDE drives in *double gasp* production servers. I don't see myself going back soon.
If you have an unlimited budget, then hardware RAID with SCSI disks is great. I might still argue with you about if hardware or software RAID is faster. But if you live in the rest of the world, where money matters, you can't beat IDE drivers for price/performance, especially with the 7200's with 2MB caches available now. Going IDE means I can have a spare in the box and possibly one on the shelf. In short, my boxes are more reliable and just as fast for the same money.
The only downside I can note with IDE is that I have to turn the box off to replace a drive. Get some $15 shuttles and the box is down for all of 3 minutes. These Promise controllers allow Hot-Swap IDE RAID-1, I believe.
The overhead is pretty minimal. I do RAID-5, and even with the extra CPU needed for IDE controllers, I still don't see much CPU usage (sorry, I don't have hard numbers... can't find my Bonnies). Actually, on the ATA33 controllers that I'm using, it seemed the bottle neck was the controller bandwidth. On a 3 way RAID-5, I always pulled roughly 25MB/sec, regardless of CPU, block sizes, etc. After thinking about it, it made sense; with RAID-5 reads, I'm reading from 2 drives at a time, and ATA33 can sustain only 16.6/bus. After OS overhead, seeks, etc. 12.5/bus ain't bad.
Linux does have pretty good HW RAID support. Mylex, DPT, and ICP-Vortex come to mind. All well supported. And you can always go with an external RAID chassis solution, where the external box does the RAID and just connect a SCSI channel to it. Since it looks like any other SCSI disk, it is OS independent. This is perhaps the simplest approach, but can also be expensive.
Enough rambling... off to some starcraft.
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.