[ Thanks to Patrick
Mullen for this link. ]
“If you’re building a computer, it’s hard to find a better time
than the present. These days, there are countless options in just
about every area of computing. AMD or Intel, NVIDIA or ATI, IBM or
Maxtor, and finally, for IDE RAID, Promise or 3Ware. While there
are many other options for other components as well as IDE RAID,
Promise’s and 3Ware’s are the unique solutions out of the sea of
IDE RAID because they work next to flawlessly in Linux.”
“Today we’re going to deal with Promise’s IDE RAID controller,
which may turn some people off with its binary-only drivers
(3Ware’s are open source), but what it lacks in its licensing, it
makes up for in its outstanding price. For about $75 USD a Promise
FastTrak 100 PCI can be had, compared to $150 for 3Ware’s
comparable card. Both cards are capable of both RAID 0 and RAID 1,
so I’ll let you be the judge of which card is truly better.”
“If you crave more hard disk speed and today’s single disk
setups aren’t satisfying your need for speed, RAID 0 is about the
best way to go. If redundancy is your passion, RAID 1 can more than
fit the bill, as well. Here’s a quick overview on exactly how RAID
achieves such feats.”
“I’ve always found it a little tough to find Promise’s drivers,
but I finally tracked them down. The Promise FastTrak drivers are
for Red Hat 7.0 and 6.2, which are the only versions of Linux
officially supported in this binary-only driver — that means
you’ll need to do some magic in order to get the kernel working
with other distributions or other kernels. Prepare to do brain
surgery for kernel 2.4. These will work for Promise FastTrak 66/100
controllers, and that includes the “Lite” (which only supports RAID
0 and RAID 1) version that is integrated onto motherboards such as
Gigabyte’s GA-7ZXR. I’ve tried them on a FastTrak 100, FastTrak 66,
and FastTrak 100 Lite and the drivers work flawlessly on each
controller.” Complete
Story – 3 Pages
Complete Story – 1 Page (Printable Version)