# What about Promise Fasttrak S150 SX4 ?

## Swiss.Mage

Hi all !

I am a little surprised to note that almost nobody speaks about the new S-ATA RAID-5 controller released by Promise.

Did someone have any experience with it ?

----------

## sphantom

yeah, i just got one today coincidentally, and let me tell you support for it is quite lacking. The promise chip it uses is the PDC20621 which is the same as the Promise SX4000 raid card, except with SATA support. When you get down to it, all they did is add the marvel bridge chips to convert a native PATA RAID processor to be able to use SATA.

In any case like i was saying the support for the PDC20621 support is lacking.. support is coming around for other Promise cards, including SATA ones, but really only for the ones youre finding built into motherboards and such that perform RAID functions in the driver if at all (in otherwords, not true hardware raid). 

Since the REAL hardware RAID cards arent as common theres not as much a hurry to support them. I've scoured the internet far and wide and found that promise actually did release some source code for the SX4000 (which as i said uses the same chip), and I actually did get the module to compile and load, but I was having some issues that i think were DMA related. This module seem to use a SCSI implementation instead of the ataraid module, and I'm reading that promise did a hokey job with the driver and its doubtful it will ever make it into any kernel.

At this point I'm really not sure what I'm going to do about it. Promise does provide support for Suse and Redhat, so I might do that as a last ditch efford until some decent kernel drivers come around, but switching my server away from gentoo is not something I really feel like doing.

If anyone else has anything to add, please do so.

-sp

----------

## taskara

based on the 2.4.22 vanilla kernel, the only chipsets with support are:

 *Quote:*   

> 
> 
> PROMISE PDC202{46|62|65|67} support
> 
> PROMISE PDC202{68|69|70|71|75|76|77} support
> ...

 

as 20261 is NOT listed here, I don't think it will work.

your best bet would be to try ac-sources, or perhaps the latest 2.6-test6 kernel... good luck!

----------

## sphantom

The chip the SX4 and SX4000 use is the promise PDC20621 not the PDC 202xx. Kernel support for this chip is virtually non-existant in 2.4.xx, and as far as I can tell ALL ataraid support has been pulled from 2.6 at this point. Probably has something to do with the complete rewrite of the ATA subsystem.

Since my original post I've made some progress on getting it to work.. I finally got that "DMA" problem squared away, and the damn thing appeared to be running just fine.. After a few days of use however, and my first backup of the data on the drives things didn't appear to be very stable. I finally got fed up with it enough to install redhat and use the prepackaged binary drivers from promise and I'm happy to report things appear to be running great right now.

No idea what would cause it to run under redhat and not gentoo, perhaps the source code isnt the same as the binary, or redhats kernel sources have something in it that gentoo doesn't. I tried compiling redhat-sources but was unable to get the thing to compile after repeated attempts. I guess my thinkin now is just deal with Redhat until some real kernel drivers make it into 2.6 sometime.

-sp

----------

## taskara

errr.. bugga  :Sad: 

so if u want real hardware raid support, perhaps 3Ware is the only way to go?

----------

## esoteriskdk

I made the mistake of buying a Promise Fasttrack S150 SX4 (PDC20621) and found that no matter what I did, it would only recognize my arrays as seperate disks. So I ended up buying a 3Ware card, which works like a charm.

I'm still interested in getting the SX4 to work though, but even with the latest 2.6.3 kernel, it's still the same problem. There has been a lot of talk about this card being "real" hardware or not. Initially one would think so, since it's able to boot RAID5 and it being 3 times the price of other Promise cards, but then again many says otherwise.

Today I stumbled upon this bit of information from the Gentoo AMD 64 page, where it specifically calls the PDC20621 (albeit the PATA version SX4000) for hardware

So I'm confused again  :Confused: 

----------

## taskara

 *esoteriskdk wrote:*   

> I made the mistake of buying a Promise Fasttrack S150 SX4 (PDC20621) and found that no matter what I did, it would only recognize my arrays as seperate disks. So I ended up buying a 3Ware card, which works like a charm.
> 
> I'm still interested in getting the SX4 to work though, but even with the latest 2.6.3 kernel, it's still the same problem. There has been a lot of talk about this card being "real" hardware or not. Initially one would think so, since it's able to boot RAID5 and it being 3 times the price of other Promise cards, but then again many says otherwise.
> 
> Today I stumbled upon this bit of information from the Gentoo AMD 64 page, where it specifically calls the PDC20621 (albeit the PATA version SX4000) for hardware
> ...

 

yes that is interesting.. and I'm wondering what driver they are using, and why WE can't use it on your system.... !??

----------

## dmouritsendk

Have any of you tried this driver:

http://www.uwsg.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0307.2/2039.html

----------

## taskara

 *dmouritsendk wrote:*   

> Have any of you tried this driver:
> 
> http://www.uwsg.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0307.2/2039.html

 

yep, I even made a thread here  on Oct 24th last year  :Wink: 

----------

## blacksheep2

Hi!

I would like to know about the todays troubles with this card..? Are there any? 

Because I want to buy a S150 TX4 for my Gentoo system... Is this recommed?

greezzz blacksheep2

----------

