On Mon, 23 Aug 1999, Alexis Maldonado wrote:
> Hello! > > Has anyone used the FastTrack 66 controller from Promise in Linux? Does it > work well? Do we need kernel drivers for this board? Are they available? > > I would like to get two Ultra/DMA-66 hard drives, and use this board for an > inexpensive RAID-0 setup (stripping). It's supposed to be quite fast, > and it would be extremely cheap in comparison to SCSI. > > Someone on the list wrote that the Promise Ultra 66 controller works, but > that one doesn't do RAID, so I need to find out about the FastTrack 66 > controller. > > Thank you in advance for all your help, > [sigsnip] Hello. I don't know about the Promise UDMA/66 controllers, but I know a little about their UDMA/33 controllers from experience. The only difference between their basic UDMA/33 and their RAIDed UDMA/33 was in their controller's BIOS and in the drivers disk. Both cards used the exact same components and the exact same PCBs. The only visual difference was in the label on the BIOS chip and in the lettering applied to the boards. I think I tested these with Windows 98 and with Debian 2.0 and 2.1 prerelease with a 2.1.1xx kernel (don't remember the exact revision) and it saw both boards exactly the same. I suspect this RAID board actually did the RAID in software that ran inside Windows9x, and didn't seem to have enough smarts to let the array access outside the GUI mode or in "safe" mode. Maybe the UDMA/66 RAID board does do the array at the host controller level, but I would doubt it based on my experiences with the UDMA/33 -- Ferret no baka
