# Promise Raid/Ultra100 controllers

## Vlad

Does anyone have any more information on the FastTrak Feature in the kernel? I have two computers with A7V133-RAID motherboards (Promise PDC20265 - currently set to it's non-raid form), and haven't been able to find any documentation on exactly what the "Special UDMA Feature" and "Special FastTrak Feature" are. Needless to say, I'd really like to know. If anyone can explain it to me or point me to a page that would exaplain it, I would really appreciate it :). 

Vlad

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## Guest

they are pretty new and i doubt that there is much information on them have you tried searching google?

if you enable the support for the non-raid promise controllers under the atapi ide section of the kernel configuration is the chipset useable?

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## BillyD

I have the Promise chip on my MB and am using it in a RAID 0 setup with Gentoo.  For RAID, you need to enable the Special FastTrak Feature - I am really not sure what the use of the Special UDMA Feature is for, however I suspect it is to ustilise a driver specifically for the Promise controller when you are running in a non-raid setup.

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## rommel

well i am using just a normal ide channel tx2 controller and enabaled all the stuff under the promise section....it works though...i have linux software raid0 setup on two drives....i had a hpt370a but only got it to boot once and the throughput was miserable....so i bagged that and got this...this is really pretty cool...i get like 69mb/s running hdparm ...i dont think the raid cards do that well under linux 

can you run the promise controller as just strait up ide channels with out having them be in an array?

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## BillyD

Yes you can - the drives will be named hde and hdg respectively.

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## rommel

well if that is the case and you get good throughput running them like that then i wouldnt use promise raid...i would use lsr instead...it will give you better performance if your trying to setup a raid 0 cinfig...but boot cant be on the raid so you have to set up a separate boot partition....i did both boot and swap as a gig and the rest as raid 0 in an extended partitionn on easch drive...but you could set up a mirrored boot partition on each drive (raid 1) and then stripe the swap ...i didnt think of that when i set it up and was being anal about gettting the size of the raided partitions the same...lol...but in anycase a mirrored boot might be a good safty net i guess should the boot sector on say hde get hosed you could redirect grub to boot from hdg.

i couldnt get a highpoint 370a to give very good performance as normal ide channels...very poor was as good as it got..so i bought the pci tx2 and it works really well.

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