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

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.