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.

Comments

Re:There is a much easier way of doing this

[Anonymous Coward]

Mate, you screwed up again.

This is the URL...

http://www.storagereview.com/welcome.pl/http://www .storagereview.com/ubb/For um1/HTML/002964.html

Odd URL huh?

But does Linux support the RAID features?

[Andy Dodd]

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.

Re:There is a much, much, much easier way to do th

[cymen]

correct link?

Re:RAID for $65

[PD]

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.

Re:really?

[garver]

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.

A quicker and easier mod:

[Delboy]

Heres a snippet from the news section of http://www.hardocp.com

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

Removing BIOS, a reminder...

[dogma256]

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.

Software RAID : cheaper, easier, safer

[Oestergaard]

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.

The FastTrack66 is _NOT_ a raid controller

[k8to]

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.

1. On crappy operating systems like DOS, where the BIOS is used to access the disk, you get a free software raid without having to load wacky TSRs. (Remember DOS has no such thing as a reasonable driver).
2. _IF_ you can get this properly supported under linux, you can have one set of disks going in software raid across multiple operating systems.

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.

RAID for $65

[KyleCordes]

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.

Re:Software RAID: slower, more dangerous!!!!

[poopie]

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?

There is a much easier way of doing this

[DingALing]

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.