Re: Promise Fasttrak 100 PDC20267 on Debian

[Albert Dengg <a_d@gmx.at>]

On Thu, 16 Oct 2003 11:41:44 -0700
Paul Yeatman <pyeatman@ucsd.edu> wrote:

...
> This makes me think I should clarify something here, however: I'm
> wanting to do hardware RAID, not software RAID.  I'm assuming because
> we are talking about RAID cards (vs. IDE cards) that this is assumed
> but possibly it is not.  On the Red Hat machine that I set up to do
> hardware RAID'ing with a Promise card (using Promise's instructions
> and driver), the system isn't RAID'ing at all.  It simply sees the
> RAID array as a scsi device.
> 
> I wanting to do the same on a Debian system if possible.
...

Well using the opensource driver (pdcraid.o) you will be seeing the ide
drives but the array is accessed through the /dev/ataraid/dX
and/dev/ataraid/dXpY which is nearly the same I think? You should only
use the ide drives directly for read only operations (for example to
monitor the drives with SMART)....
but be aware that neither with the promise nor with the opensource
drivers the Fasttrack series card do hw raid, but instead it uses
the CPU to process the operations....it has in fact i think some
problems because in linux you are not able to do an automatic rebuild
after one drive failed in a raid1 array(last time i checked i think it
was with both tyoes of drivers whereas you are using linux sw raid...)

if you want to use the promise scsi emulation drivers in debian you find
instrutions/drivers here:
http://people.debian.org/~blade/install/	(goto the preload floppy)

But i never tried it (i gave up using the promise raid controller after
the MB tied (it was an onboard controller), but I would recommend to
stick to the opensource driver. One warning though: it is _not_ included
in the 2.5/2.6 kernel....

yours, Albert

-- 
Albert Dengg <a_d@gmx.at>