Does anyone have knowledge and/or experience installing a RAID card on a PC under Linux? (any distribution)

In theory a RAID card can double the READ speed of the cheaper IDE drives (RAID1) just as it does for MS Windows environments.

I have two different brands of RAID card,

(1) an earlier HOT ROD 100, (which seems to be a superior one BIOS software-wise)

(2) a PROMISE technology Tx2000 FastTrak Ultra ATA/133 RAID card (its software BIOS is simple but seems to lack some handy features. )

Anyone with experience combining Linux with either of these two cards I would be delighted to hear from!

Since I had FastTrak already installed as a second DATA drive (divided into logical drives) with two 60 gig IDE drives (one per cable) on it, (one is invisible, the other appears as the 'drive')
that is with Windows2000,

When I installed Gentoo on another drive on the main IDE motherboard controller and booted off that, I was able to read the FastTrak drive(s)...(I suspect writing to them without the driver installed into Linux may cause problems...) and copy files to the drive as a fast backup DATA drive. So if you want RAID 1 as a fast secondary DATA drive this seems to be okay....

But Of course I wish the MAIN BOOT drive were a RAID 1 (secretly with two drives on it).

This would double the READ speed of the MAIN Linux Partition. To do this in Windows2000 is rather easy:

(1) you install Win2K on an ordinary IDE drive:

(2) you install the card in a slot with NO drives attached.

(3) you install the driver that comes with the card into the operating system.

(4) you hook up and format a drive, and add a second as a mirror.

(5) with the Hot Rod 100 you could now actually physically move your IDE drive over to the (SCSI) RAID controller and after resetting your BIOS to boot off the (SCSI) card you had a RAID system working for your 'BOOT' drive roughly speaking.

(6) With WIndows you can run into a few problems with re-assignment of Logical Drive letters, causing Win2K not to boot properly or not being able to log on as Administrator,
but those problems can be worked out... I forget the details now.

I wonder if there is a similar procedure to get a Linux BOOT drive to run off one of these cards. I think the RAID as extra DATA disk is probably not a big deal, if you can format the drives after they are installed, from Linux.

Any ideas?

I found these links while searching....

Here is the Promise Website: They have drivers for RH and Mandrake,
but if I want GENTOO I have to download SOURCE - (a help file but no tech support)
(select Operating System=OTHER on their menu pulldown)
At present my skills are not up to knowing how to use this code or do install...

http://www.promise.com/support/download/


Here is a link describing an alternate install to the one posted on the PROMISE site:

http://www.expresshosting.net/howto/...d_redhat9.html

I could still use a hand if anyone else is using a PROMISE Tx2000 with generic Linux...