We picked up this card because Promise claimed it was Linux Compatible. Bung. Binary-only drivers for micro-specific distributions makes this card moslty useless in any production Linux environment, which I could never in good conscience recommend any of our clients use it. Giving up on it and selling the card to someone else. Currently in the market for some 3Ware goods.

See this page for a more thorough investigation.

In short - if you want to run an old outdated kernel that you can't update then this thing might work for you. Try a Google search for "sx4000, lkml" and get a better insight into why not to use this card in Linux.

The previous post is correct, regarding the lack of support on the official Promise web site.

However, there is a group at yahoo, at the address

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/sx4000linux/

and the corresponding web site

http://majestic.lugh.de/~fs/promise/index.html

In the above, one may find drivers that may be compiled to run on any kernel version (have not tried it personally with 2.6.x series).

In my own box I run a RAID-5 w/ 3 disks and it works fine. I also use the array utilities from the Promise support download page (which were meant for Redhat).

It is important to install the latest firmware, which is currently 2.0.0.4 (new one is expected in March 04)

Regards,

StratosL

This product has no native Linux support. The drivers released by Promise, including the ones on the web sites described by stratosl, are pre-compiled for single thread i386 only. The "source" available uses 3 object libraries.

Promise claims that their drivers contain "intellectual property" and cannot be released to the public domain, though how a hardware company can feel threatened by making their hardware compatible I have no idea.