# promise or highpoint hardware or software raid?

## taskara

from my observations (talking raid 0):

most people seem to think that promise raid sux under linux because it's really just a "software" windows solution with crappy linux drivers. Promise release no source drivers for linux.

people seem to like highpoint because they heave a source driver for linux (but i haven't seen it on their webpage) - tho highpoint's raid is also "software" - not true hardware raid.

others swear by linux software raid (lsr) on an ide controller.

SO my question is:

do you think highpoint "hardware" raid is better than lsr under gentoo?

which will give you a better raid solution? which is faster? which is more reliable?

should I throw out my promise pdc 20270 raid controller for a standard ata133 controller and use lsr, or change it to a highpoint raid card?

let the wars begin  :Smile: 

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## rommel

no its not better....if your not going to shell out the money for a good harware raid solution (which will not give you better performance then lsr just free up a few cpu cycles) then use linux softare raid...its fun to set up too and it supports all raid levels and is hot swapable.

and you may want to see if you can use that promise controller as two ide channels , does it allow for that in its bios?...if so you could use what you ahve for lsr just fine...i know i messed with a gigabyte mobo that had an onboard promise raid chip and it allowed you to toggle between regular ide channel function or raid.

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## taskara

so you think lsr is faster than promise and highpoint controllers?

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## Yama

I have an ASUS A7V333 mobo with an integrated Promise PDC20276 controller in addition to the standard VIA one. The PDC is a 'lite' version of a Promise Fastrak controller, and can only run in RAID mode. This means that it can't handle devices like CD-ROM drives.

However, I found a way around this. I have two Seagate 80GB IDE drives, a CD-burner and a DVD-ROM drive. I wanted to keep each device on its own channel, meaning there could be no slave devices, and I didn't want to use Promise's WinRAID. After some searching, I found this site: http://www.lumberjacker.de/Downloads/downloads.html.

I downloaded the Pure UDMA 133 version of the A7V333 BIOS and used ASUS's flash utility to write it to the chip. Now the Promise chip behaves like an UDMA133 controller, and I can put my burner and DVD on it. To have them working in Windows, I had to load a driver (included with the new BIOS), and for GNU/Linux I had to compile a kernel with PDCxxxxx support.

All my drives work fine, and I am flawlessly running Linux software RAID and EVMS on the hard drives.

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## taskara

that's sounds cool

I have a promise 20270 raid controller, with msi kt333 mainboard - so I can't flash any bois'  :Sad: 

so maybe I should throw my promise card away and get a highpoint raid controller (which can be used as just an ata card) or just a pci ide controller and use software raid on it.

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## Yama

Is the Promise chip integrated into the motherboard? If it's a separate card, you can still flash it (look for "Roms Promise" on the lumberjacker.de page).

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## rommel

yeah i did the same with a program called cbrom....actually i inserted teh bios file i wanted for the onboard highpoint raid controller into the bios for the mainboard...and then flashed the bios of the mainboard like you would normally.

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## JohnHerdy

1 comment about the Promise don't release source drivers for linux: this is not true. Promise is actively developing drivers for their hardware. And they are doing it on the one and only right place: the kernel. Just check the kernel-mailinglist and you will see a lot of patches, comments and discussion between employees of Promise and other kernel-hackers (especially Alan Cox). There are a lot of hardware suppliers that keep the drivers on their website which is IMHO the wrong place.

Regards,

John Herdy.

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## taskara

that's a good point - I was unaware that they were actively contributing to the kernel support for their controllers - still some source drivers would be nice from their page, instead of pre-packaged versions for limited distros.

The pdc driver Gentoo uses for installing (v 1.2) appears to be a beta - you can see when you "modprobe pdcraid" - so does this mean that it uses this beta driver, or the kernel support, or are both needed? and if so, then shouldn't we have a source from promise? 

I am beginning to agree tho that either lsr or full hardware raid is the way to go.

 ?

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## Pigeon

 *Quote:*   

> (which will not give you better performance then lsr just free up a few cpu cycles)

 

*cough* Otherwise known as better performance.  :Rolling Eyes: 

Anyway... I think I've just figured out all the problems people have been having (myself included) with booting Gentoo on a HPT/Promise card using GRUB.  I'll write something up tomorrow or the next day, assuming it keeps working.

Anandtech had an interesting article up a while about RAID performance.  One has to question their methods though, since all the systems they tested, including plain ol' IDE, were within 5% of each other.  :Rolling Eyes:   Exception being CPU usage, where software based RAID took about half as much CPU usage as hardware based.  Pretty funny.  Have to wonder what they did wrong. (hell, have to wonder whether they did it at all)

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## JohnHerdy

The PDC-driver on the gentoo 1.2 ISO is relatively old. The nifty updates went in 2.4.19-RC?. But no worries with the beta driver you can start the installation. When you come to the point where you must choose your kernel go for vanilla 2.4.19 (the Gentoo-source is based on 2.4.19-pre? so it's not in there). Select PDC-RAID in the kernel and there you go. I'm using it myself and it's very fast. I agree with full hardware RAID is the way to go but it's also more expensive. The PDC-RAID is the next best thing because it is using less CPU then LSR. If you have any trouble installing PDC-RAID please let me know I have done it before and might be able to help you.

Regards,

John Herdy.

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## rommel

if your running some dog system then any software based raid will hurt you...but if your running like a 2ghz + proccessor and scsi with pc2400 cas 2 ddr then its really doesnt matter...LOL

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## taskara

thanks John.

I have setup a gentoo box with raid 0 on my pdc raid controller.

and also a raid 1 on a pdc raid controller.

It all works sweet - but how can I check it's all working properly.. or what can I use to test?

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## lukeren

Hey!

I've been looking around this forum, but no one seems to have the same config as I do.

I've got the FastTrack 133 "Lite" onboard my ASUS P4B266-E, but I don't use the RAID function. I just use it to get the extra 4 IDE ports for my harddrives.

When I try to "modprobe pdcraid" I get "Promise Fasttrak(tm) Softwareraid driver 0.03beta: No raid array found" which is very logical, since there is no array to be found.

Anyone have a way out of this? It's been bugging me for quite some time, and all my data is on that controller.

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## Pigeon

Does the pdc202xx driver work? (has to be enabled in the kernel)

Also, do you have any ill effects other than the error message?  If you don't, well.. *shrug*

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## taskara

if you're not using the promise onboard controller as a raid card - then you don't need to insmod pdcraid.

just make sure you enable support for that promise card in your kernel.

if you want to use software raid, then follow the set of instructions under the documentation area of the forum.

 :Smile: 

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## lukeren

Well, I'm at work at the moment, so I can't find the EXACT error message, but what it tells me when the kernel boots, is something like this:

PDCxxxx: ignored by SCAN_PCI_IDE_DEVICES uses own driver

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## JohnHerdy

 *taskara wrote:*   

> It all works sweet - but how can I check it's all working properly.. or what can I use to test?

 

What do you wan't to test (it all works sweet)? You can test/tune performance with hdparm.

Regards,

John Herdy.

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## col

 *Yama wrote:*   

>  I found this site: http://www.lumberjacker.de/Downloads/downloads.html.
> 
> 

 

Cool can anyone confim....does this flash my promise raid bios from the "lite" to the "pro" version (my gigabyte 7vrxp has the lite bios) ... this is what it looks like but I dont read german

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## taskara

JohnHerdy, but how can I test it with hdparm, when it only test a direct device ?

ie, I can run "hdparm -tT /dev/hde" but not "/dev/ataraid/disc0/disc"

and then aren't I just checking the speed of the single original drive?

I have done this, and the results seem to be the same as my drive without raid 0.

 ??

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## taskara

and col, yes I believe that is to "upgrade" your bios to make your lite promise controller to a full controller. the idea has been around for a while.

honestly there's not much point if you just use raid 0

can't guarantee that they are all going to work properly tho. and don't forget if you update to a new gigabyte bios it will re-set the promise controller back to lite.

be warned that you could cause your bios to stop working properly, and if that happens your mainboard wont work.

there is a way to fix that if you have an eprom programmer (which I do) but even then the bios chip has to be supported.

If you only use raid 0 - I wouldn't bother

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## JohnHerdy

 *taskara wrote:*   

> JohnHerdy, but how can I test it with hdparm, when it only test a direct device ?

 

Do you have a /dev/md?

Regards,

John Herdy.

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## JohnHerdy

I apologise for my previous comment. I was on my work and kinda busy so I wasn't paying enough attention. /dev/md? is obviously for linux raid. Now I'm home and more relaxed so reading my comment again doesn't make me happy. To test performance on your drive, do the following:

emerge dbench

i.e dbench 10

Regards,

John Herdy.

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## lukeren

Ok, the message I get is this:

Aug 12 20:45:12 gentoo kernel: PDC20276: ignored by ide_scan_pci_device() (uses own driver)

Anyone knows what that means?

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## taskara

thanks john  :Smile: 

I'll give it a go

lukeren:

are you using raid ? if so are you using lsr or "hardware" raid?

can u still access the drives on the card, even with this error?

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## col

 *taskara wrote:*   

> 
> 
> honestly there's not much point if you just use raid 0
> 
> be warned that you could cause your bios to stop working properly, and if that happens your mainboard wont work.
> ...

 

I know but this is very usefull if I want to set up a stripe set. The "lite" bios has limits on the stripe set block size. Also the gigabyte 7vrxp has a dual bios so if it is bad I can recover to my original bios.

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## taskara

go for it!  :Very Happy: 

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## col

 *taskara wrote:*   

> go for it! 

 

sweeeeeeet ..... my promise lite bios has been flashed to the full TX2000 bios. Works perfectly on my ga-7vrxp

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## taskara

kewl!   :Cool: 

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