# Promise FastTrak TX2000

## Jesore

I'm thinking about getting myself a raid system and was wondering if anyone has experience with the Promise Fasttrak TX2000.

There are binary drivers for it at the promise site but when I read the help in the kernel config it tells me that there is support up to udma100 devices, but the TX2000 ist a 133 device.

My question is as I don't want the binary drivers (that would be intersting to set up while compiling gentoo) :

Is the help outdated or is there really no support in the kernel yet ?

Btw. I use the gentoo-2.4.19-r10 (great thing by the way - supermount works - no patching by hand anymore !)

At least one person had luck with the current kernel :

https://listman.redhat.com/pipermail/ataraid-list/2002-September/001147.html

but I don't want to spend money based on one opinion (after all he could be a idiot that has a totally different card an just can't read   :Twisted Evil:  ) .

Jesore

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## klieber

If you can hold off for a few weeks or months, you'll get a lot better performance and a lot fewer hassles with a serial ATA RAID setup.  Serial ATA is already showing up on motherboards and hard drives are being released as well.

If you're more interested in the here and now, I've had very good results with the Promise TX2 RAID card.  I'm running one with a pair of 120GB mirrored drives on my main file server at home.

--kurt

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## Jesore

Sounds interesting, but I didn't want a new motherboard. Any idea when pci cards incl. raid come out - and more important when the controller I want isn't supported yet how long will it take with the ATA cards ?

Btw. I've found out that in the 2.5 kernel the device is already supported - so it shouldn't be long or it already is in the 2.4 kernel. Documentation often lags behind so it could be.

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## pjp

You might see what a forum search for 'promise' turns up... I know several people have used their products.  I'm using the TX2 (not sure if thats different from the TX2000).

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## Jesore

Already done that. 

All I found referred to older cards and other problems - as these cards are generally supported (that of course doesn't mean they can't cause trouble   :Wink:  )

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## klieber

 *Jesore wrote:*   

> Any idea when pci cards incl. raid come out - and more important when the controller I want isn't supported yet how long will it take with the ATA cards ?

 

Actually, turns out Serial ATA RAID cards are available and also supported under Linux

I may have to pick me up one of those...

--kurt

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## Jesore

That really is good news.

Thanks !

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## Jesore

Hmm - doesen't that article say that 3com provides the drivers ?

On the 3com website I've only found binary drivers for redhat and suse.

No word about kernel sources support.  I may be wrong, but I don't think these will work under gentoo.

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## klieber

 *Jesore wrote:*   

> Hmm - doesen't that article say that 3com provides the drivers ?

 

3com != 3ware.

3com makes networking products, 3ware makes storage products.

--kurt

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## Jesore

just mistyped - my fault. 

I was on the 3WARE site but was also browsing 3com products at this time. So I mixed up the names.

But my posting about the binary only drivers hasn't changed - besides the name. I haven't found any signs of kernel = source support for these products and that is what we need for gentoo. I could live with binary drivers (nvidia), but only if I know they work in gentoo.

Btw. I really would love to see the performance of nvidia drivers precompiled exactly for my system with a little more agressive flags. As far as I know they are i386, right?

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## losi

Hi there,

I'm currently using a Promise Fasttrak TX2000 (doing RAID 1), running with the open sourced drivers (included in vanilla 2.4.19), in my fileserver. I'd say it's running fair enough, but I wouldn't say that the performance and the reliability is up to par with my expectations. The whole setup turned out to be quite complicated too because I'm using a mainboard that's got another promise chip embedded. I've also experienced some weird lockups with a SCSI card installed in the system.

The most decieving thing to me was that the Fasttrack doesn't really do hardware RAID, but the replicating / stripping task is left to the driver. For that purpose I could have used linux metadevices or EVMS

So now I find myself turning my head to other products/manufacturers, and 3ware happens to be among one of them. Unlike what Jesore posted, I have to say that 3ware cards have been supported by the linux kernel since mid-2.2 series. A search in the linux-kernel archives reveals that developers from 3ware have been quite actively interacting with Linux kernel developers and users.

Nevertheless, I think that 3ware cards are quite more expensive   :Crying or Very sad: 

cheersLast edited by losi on Sat Nov 16, 2002 10:50 pm; edited 1 time in total

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## losi

oh.. to my bad experience with TX2000 I forgot to add that I could only make it work on PIO. That might be more my fault than the driver's though, I'm not sure...

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## Jesore

the 3ware devices - can you tell me the name of the kernel module or the option to be activated ?

By the way I didn't say the 3ware devices are not supported, I merely said I could find nothing on these NEW devices (serial ata raid) being supported besides binary drivers on the website itself. 

I may be blind though.

Glad to hear the promise do work at all. Small hint - give try the ac-kernel a try. There they are officially in the kernel. In the vanilla 

there are only devices up to the PDC20270. Yours is a 71!

That could be the source of your problems with the card.

As I want that card as well you can bet I'm interested in your further experience if you are willing to share.

Btw. Where did you read that about no hardware raid, I'm very interested!

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## losi

Hi there

3ware's driver is a SCSI driver called 3w-xxxx. It supports the Serial ATA boards, this is, the Escalade 8000 series. Actually, if you download one of the drivers from their website (I tried with RedHat), it's actually the same open source driver you can find in the linux tree. It includes some compiled modules so you just have to copy and load them.

thank you for the pointer about trying the ac branch... it hadn't occured to me that I had the card only half-working because I was forcing the driver to use a chip it doesn't really support. I'll check this (I'm not sure, though, because I have to be able to apply ReiserFS quota patches) and let you know how it works for me.

about the no hardware RAID, I might have been a bit hot-blooded about that. It's called quasi-hardware (sounds bad to me, anyway) and I first read about it in the Linux ATA RAID HOWTO, which covers the Promise FastTrak driver.

i'm currently taking a peek at the pdcraid.c, which I believe is the open source FastTrak driver. I can see things that would ideally better be left to a hardware controller, like choosing what disk to read from... there's some funny partition geometry caculation... it needs a deeper read, though, to understand to what extent FastTrak is hardware RAID and to what extent it is not.

now, on the other hand, 3w-xxxx.c is huge and I hardly understand a thing from it. mainly because I'm not familiar to SCSI commands. anyway, it looks to me like there's a cleaner interface between hardware and this driver, might be wrong though.

comparing both brands, it looks to me that the folks at promise have a cheaper and dumber controller. That's not a problem (unless we're talking about real high availability needs) if you make up for it with good drivers. Unfortunately they only offer a closed source driver and I don't really know how helpful they are with the guy that wrote/maintains the open source one...  I'm just upset they don't support a good open source driver for linux.

well... anyway, it's late here.

regards,

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## Jesore

A SCSI driver ? 

Are we still talking about ide drives? Or is this sth like the ide cdburners scsi wrapper - but at least that's the reason why I didn't find the damned driver. I was looking in the same section where the promise card is (in menuconfig). 

I found another interesting card - at least from the price standpoint.

DAWI PCI DC-133 Ultra DMA Raid

Silicon Image SiI0680

Below 70 Euro (Should be less in $ - yes I haven't set up the Euro key yet, so what!), that's far below the promise ones.

Does anyone know this card?

Thanks for the info by the way!

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## losi

yeah... it's sort of the same that happens with ide cdburners, only that happenning at a different level, I think. Here you have that the controller takes SCSI commands, but it talks IDE with the attached hard-drives. With the CD-burners, the peripheral is the one that takes the SCSI commands.

looks like Dawi is a nice one. I'm not sure linux can make this one work, right now...

If you haven't read it yet, you might enjoy this article at Tom's Hardware:

http://www6.tomshardware.com/storage/02q4/021112/index.html

regards,

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## Jesore

I finally found a solution for the Dawi card !

Obviously it was just a name problem. As far as I now know the Sil0680 chip is the same as the CMD680 (read both names together at different places) which is well supported - if you want to find them, they're about 3-5 lines above the highpoint ata drivers.

I now ordered the card with two drives (WD800JB) and hope I'm right with my guess. I will keep you updated if there is any interest.

Jesore

Btw. I've read in several reviews that the drives (WD) mentioned above are quite good - any personal experience with them ?

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## krazo

 *Jesore wrote:*   

> I finally found a solution for the Dawi card !
> 
> Obviously it was just a name problem. As far as I now know the Sil0680 chip is the same as the CMD680 (read both names together at different places) which is well supported - if you want to find them, they're about 3-5 lines above the highpoint ata drivers.
> 
> I now ordered the card with two drives (WD800JB) and hope I'm right with my guess. I will keep you updated if there is any interest.
> ...

 

I have a WDC WD800BB drive, works great and is very quick. I recommened them.

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## Jesore

Ok, here are my results so far.

1. The drives are FAST !!!

2. Even more so in raid 0 !!!

3. I was right with the CMD680 chipset - the kernel recognizes it at boot time with that name. 

4. I found out that just because there is support for the ide chipset there is not necessarily support for the card as a raid controller (as far as in NOW know only promise and highpoint cards have that - and of course pure hardware raid controllers). That means under linux I have to resort to software raid.

5. After some cursing I found out that this is actually a good thing as software raid is said to have better performance than the card spacific drivers. The only drawback is that The arrays are not compartible, meaning a dawi specific array under windows can't be accessed from linux and vice versa. I couln'd care less - I have a spare disk. Half of it will go into some Solaris testing and the other half into file transfers - for the seldom cases I have to use win and realy transfer files. 

6. I've done something very experimental - so far it works (I'm writing this on my shiny new raid linux).

First I' told the dawi card to form a raid 0 array from my two disks, then I installed win200 on it but only used 30G (from my 160  :Smile:  ). After that I had a look at the partitions from the linux perspective. Both drives were visible - but as seperate drives with no sign of raid (there came the cursing). The first drive had a ntfs partition on it but the second seemed completely empts.

My guess now was that the raid controller writes randomly on the two drives AND uses the SAME sectors. The idea now was to partition the rest of the first drive to my liking and do the same on the second one while leaving the sectors that were used on the ntfs partition free (as I have two identical drives there was no need for calculating).

The partitions are created the raid array set up and gentoo is installed. The good thing is - both OS still boot and work perfect (as perfect you can windows expect to ...). We'll see what happenes in the long run - I really have to learn to make backups regulary.

Where I still have problems is to get grub install on the raid array. It installs correctly but the menu won't show up - even when I put /boot on a non raid partition. I get error no 17 or 15, the first then trying it on a raid 1 disk the second on a normal partition.

Maybe I'll give lilo a try. 

Oh my that's a long posting

Jesore

P.S. hdparm -t gives me 38-42 mb/s on my / (hda5) and 66-70 mb/s when I access / as the raid array. I can say it's definitely worth it. Openoffice is currently compiling and I'm really looking forward to the startup times.

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## marty

I managed to get my gentoo box booting on a Promise FastTrak TX2000, using the FastTrak.o driver (partially opensource which uses the proprietary ftlib.o provided by Promise.)

Anyway; I decided to avoid the fully opensource drivers because I came across a performance comparison that put 

the proprietary driver at about 10 times the performance of ataraid+pdc.

The trick to getting it working is to create an initrd which

loads the scsi_mod, sd_mod, and FastTrak modules.  This can

be done with the lvmcreate_initrd script.  Uncompress and mount the initrd via loopback device, and then copy in the

3 modules mentioned previously.  modprobe the necessary

modules in the linuxrc of the image.  Load the initrd from your

bootloader (grub, in my case), and the /dev/sda device

will appear representing the array, with stats available

in /proc/scsi/FastTrak/0

make sure your fstab and "root=" kernel parameter are 

updated with the "/dev/sda#" of corresponding partitions

I also tried to statically compile the module into my kernel

but with no luck...

Just to offer some opposition to the naysayers: I've never had any problem with either the TX2000 or the TX2 under windows or linux; I'm generally pretty happy with Promise and their products.

I would also like to credit Nakamitsu Hideo for the

Japanse instructions at http://solaris.bluecoara.net/ilnux/fasttrak_gentoo.phtml. Unfortunately, I don't know Japanese, but the page was still quite helpful.

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## Teardrop

i am wondering if the FastTrack S150 T2plus or the FastTrack S150 T4 are fully supported under gentoo? I just need the SATA-Controllers because i wanna do a softraid.

thx

cu Teardrop

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## Lupin III

Hi....I am thinking to pass from a RedHat distribution to a Gentoo one on my server on which I have a Promise Controller (Fasttrack tx2000). 

I want to know how marty have boot from the Gentoo Live CD...I understand the need of include the FastTrack module into the init image but I have no understand how I have to start. In the RedHat installation I boot with the driver promise into a floppy so that the raid is recognised at the boot time...with gentoo???

THX

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