Hi,
I have installed Slackware 9.0 and my motherboard is Asus A7V266-E with the on-board controller by Promise (Promise® IDE RAID Controller Supports RAID 0 or 1).
The controller is configured in stripe mode (2x WD400BB). I also have a WD800JB in the primary channel (not on the raid controller).
During installation Slackware can recognise the array as a 80GB partition and I mount it at /hdd/raid.

After installation, during boot time it recognises the two hdds separetely /dev/hde and /dev/hdg (which means that there is a driver...) as there is one hard drive in each channel of the controller.

Though, the raid is not working...

I have searched for HOWTOs but I haven't found something specific for my controller or for stripe raid (RAID-0).
Also the raidtools have a HOWTO for only RAID-5.

Any ideas?

Thank you in advance.

Anybody??

you need to install a driver so that your raid0 array is recognized at ONE drive.

dmesg output:

hub.c: USB new device connect on bus1/3, assigned device number 2
hub.c: USB hub found
hub.c: 4 ports detected
EXT3 FS 2.4-0.9.17, 10 Jan 2002 on ide0(3,2), internal journal
PROMISE FastTrak Series Linux Driver Version 1.02.0.22
scsi1 : FastTrak
Vendor: Promise Model: 2+0 Stripe/RAID0 Rev: 1.10
Type: Direct-Access ANSI SCSI revision: 02
Attached scsi disk sda at scsi1, channel 0, id 0, lun 0
SCSI device sda: 240206080 512-byte hdwr sectors (122986 MB)
sda: sda1
kjournald starting. Commit interval 5 seconds
EXT3 FS 2.4-0.9.17, 10 Jan 2002 on ide0(3,1), internal journal
EXT3-fs: mounted filesystem with ordered data mode.
kjournald starting. Commit interval 5 seconds


try google for "PROMISE FastTrak rhsmp"
http://www.murty.net/ataraid/preparation.html

promise web site:
http://www.promise.com/support/downl...wnload_eng.asp

hope this helps,
manny

I visited the site but there is no driver for slackware. Will the red hat driver do?

And another thing...
I have compiled kernel 2.4.22 which has promise support.
Is the driver from promise necessary??

RAID 0 will not help for LINUX because you have to make multiple partitions. Also RAID 0 is designed for throughput. This means it does great for video, graphics, and sound editing. RAID 0 will help for Windows users because they don't have to make multiple partitions for different directories and they need a lot of space to begin with. Windows hogs space like a pig. UNIX/LINUX doesn't require tons of space even if you are gamer. I suggest using RAID 1. This will give you data integrity so if one hard drive fails you have a spare hard drive. For LINUX you want to use one hard drive that has fast rotational speeds and low accessing times. The Raptor hard drive from Western Digital suits the requirements for fast rotational speeds and low accessing times. Also you get SCSI reliablity and 36.7 gigabytes. 36.7 gigabytes is enough for anything in UNIX/LINUX. The disadvantage of the Raptor hard drive is that it is a SATA hard drive. Many will argue but I suggest getting a SATA controller from Highpoint. Highpoint has open source drives so you do not have to worry about drivers when upgrading your kernel in the future.

Promise and Highpoint controllers are software RAID, so you would not get any performance with RAID enabled. There is a lot of latency on software RAID controllers. Using both Promise and Highpoint controllers as a stand alone standard controller will not take up processor usage.


I don't think Promise has compiled a module (driver) for kernel version 2.4.22 yet. You are out of luck if you can not find a dirver for your kernel version. You can always find out what kernel version that Redhat 7.3 uses and download it from kernel.org . Read the Promise instructions on how to compile your kernel. Each manufacture has different ways how they want you to set it up. You may have to make a ramdisk after you compile your kernel.

The module from Promise is preferred if you want the full function out of your controller. Also its better than kernel's promise support because kernel's version is an universal module that should handle almost every Promise model. Also Promise doesn't give a lot of hidden tricks that it does to kernel.org to improve on performance for each model.

I am contemplating a motherboard with promise sata raid dual xeon for a Redhat Linux server.
The server would be for mail and web services.
Would I be wasting my time using the Promise SATA controller set to RAID 0 for performance?
What if I uses an EIDE drive for most of the OS, but use the RAID 0 drive(s) for /var, /usr, and /home?

...basically I want a server that is smoking fast for hundreds of users retreiving/sending e-mail at the same time.

Thanks!

RAID 0 will not help in accessing system and mail files. It helps when applications needs a lot of bandwidth such as video, sound, and graphics. Also you have to do backups every few days just in case one of the hard drives crashes. For your type of setup, you should use SCSI drives. The reason for this is SCSI can handle a lot of requests. IBM/Hitachi was going to include multiple queue feature for their IDE hard drives but economy changed. IDE hard drives are still stuck on one request at a time. You can buy multiple small capacity IDE hard drives and use it for each directory (/var, /usr, /usr/lib/, /tmp, /home, ....). If you do this the system will work in parallel and it will give you a lot of performance. If you have several thousand US dollars, you can buy solid state storage devices from a company name E-Disk. Solid state storage devices gives you about 100 to 1000 times faster speeds than mechanical storage devices.

The controller that you are using will reduce performance. Its best to go with hardware RAID. RAID 5 will give you reduntancy or hard drive crash tolerance.

Its easy to get it smoking but to make it fast you have to tweak it bit by bit.

You are better off using LINUX distribution like Slackware, Gentoo, and many others that does not install useless programs. If I was making a server, I would use either Slackware or Gentoo. My college's server uses Redhat and I see a lot of useless files like X Window files and GUI config files.Those files are a waste of space and probably a waste of time backing up for a server.