Goswin wrote:
Hi,
I got 2 new SATA drives and pluged them into the onboard Promise
PDC20376 (FastTrak 376) and run badblocks on them (both in
parallel). The write test completed fine but read&compare locked up my
system.
I repeated with a read-only test and again it locked up with an DMA
timeout.
Does anyone have the onboard Promise successfully in use on an Asus
K8V board?
MfG
Goswin
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Goswin- My experience is now negative for the Promise controller under linux for the Promise mirroring mode. Writing to the SATA sda2 with an ext2 filesystem was not mirrored to the hidden PATA at all. The Promise controller did not notice the discrepancy and did not want to rebuild the array nor permit rebuilding when prompted. I think this is a failure of the Promise controller to cope with the ext2 filesystem or perhaps to more than one partition without regard to the way the sata_promise driver writes to the array. There was no way found to mirror less than a full disk. The disks are handled differently by DOS and Linux under the current sata_promise driver. The DOS makes two disks available when mirroring is turned off and one disk when mirroring is turned on. Linux now presents one disk whether mirroring is on or off. The new 2.6.11 is supposed to contain changes in the way the disks can be accessed. I don't think the Promise controller can natively cope with ext2 filesystems and probably many more. The Promise controller says the array is functional when the mirror is bad. My tests showed the RAID was not mirroring at all while saying the array was functioning properly. If my testing was accurate, the Promise controller fails in mirroring and the native RAID features are unusable for Linux. I have no information about the striping features. I have no plans to use the native Promise RAID modes in the future. They have limited capability to offer and failed in serious ways during my several installations. The native Promise RAID mode is now a big turn off. editor@postscript.port5.com --AMD Athlon64 @2.4Ghz Corsair TwinX1024-3200XL @480Mhz DDR ASUS A8V Deluxe ASUS Radeon A9250Ge/Td/256 Creative SB Live WD Raptor SATA Maxtor PATA IBM/Okidata Color PostScript3 Lexmark Mono PostScript2 Debian GNU/Linux debian-amd64/pure64 sid Kernel 2.6.10 XFree86 4.3.0 Xorg X11R6.8.2 1.5 Mb DSL