# Promise Ultra133-TX2

## Shining Arcanine

I have 11+ year old old Dell Dimension 350V that I want to bring back into service to function as a headless file server, private portage mirror and vpn server. I also have an old 320GB Western Digital hard drive that I am fairly certain that the IDE controller will not support at 133Mbps and also possibly, beyond its first 137GB. I have an old Promise Ultra133-TX2 PATA controller that I used to use with Windows XP on the system.

I have been searching online for information on whether or not Linux supports this controller. Based on a help text patch sumission made to a mailing list for Linux 2.5.75, it looks like CONFIG_BLK_DEV_PDC202XX_OLD under ATA/ATAPI/MFM/RLL support (DEPRECATED) under Device Drivers in the Linux 2.6.33 kernel might provide support, but it was never committed to the Linux kernel, so I am not certain if it is accurate.

I am still digging out a VGA cable so I can do some initial configuration (and BIOS & Promise firmware updates) with a monitor and keyboard to prepare the system to run headless, so I am hoping some helpful person here will have the answer by the time I find a usable cable.  :Smile: 

----------

## eccerr0r

I've found that it tends to not be worth the effort to use off-board cards if the on-board work.  Most offboard cards end up maxing out their PCI, chipset, or cpu anyway.  But it may make the LBA issue easier however, but even that can be worked around as the kernel is aware of this issue.

I'm using an even older Promise Ultra66 which uses the PDC202XX_old driver in my Athlon board, just to have more IDE-master ports (so I don't have to slave any disks).  That driver is still "supported" -- the Ultra133 is also "supported" but these use a different driver as it uses a PATA_PDC2027X (libata) or PDC202XX_new (legacy ata) driver.

My Promise Ultra66 firmware displays the two 120G disks hooked up to it on bootup as 57G disks -- all due to wraparound issues.  The Linux kernel accesses the full capacity of both disks just fine.

----------

## Simba7

I would suggest to find an old 10GB drive just as an OS drive.

I have an old K6-233 with a 2GB OS drive, a 2 Port SATA RAID PCI Card, and 2x2TB Hard Drives (RAID0 for now) in removable SATA trays. It putts along just fine and can keep up with 100mbps wire speeds quite easily. Haven't tried a gigabit card yet.

----------

## Shining Arcanine

 *Simba7 wrote:*   

> I would suggest to find an old 10GB drive just as an OS drive.
> 
> I have an old K6-233 with a 2GB OS drive, a 2 Port SATA RAID PCI Card, and 2x2TB Hard Drives (RAID0 for now) in removable SATA trays. It putts along just fine and can keep up with 100mbps wire speeds quite easily. Haven't tried a gigabit card yet.

 

Why do you suggest using an old drive to use just as an OS drive? The computer has a 8.4GB 5400RPM Maxtor hard drive from Dell in its primary drive bay, but I have a 200GB Western Digital drive that I could (with the help of the promise controller) use in place of it. I would think that would be better suited as an OS drive.

----------

## Simba7

 *Shining Arcanine wrote:*   

>  *Simba7 wrote:*   I would suggest to find an old 10GB drive just as an OS drive.
> 
> I have an old K6-233 with a 2GB OS drive, a 2 Port SATA RAID PCI Card, and 2x2TB Hard Drives (RAID0 for now) in removable SATA trays. It putts along just fine and can keep up with 100mbps wire speeds quite easily. Haven't tried a gigabit card yet. 
> 
> Why do you suggest using an old drive to use just as an OS drive? The computer has a 8.4GB 5400RPM Maxtor hard drive from Dell in its primary drive bay, but I have a 200GB Western Digital drive that I could (with the help of the promise controller) use in place of it. I would think that would be better suited as an OS drive.

 

Mostly because after running the system for a year, I've only used 1/3 of the space, including log files.. on a 2GB Quantum Hard Drive. Of course, I'm also running btrfs with the compression turned on.

A 200GB would be severe overkill.. and a major waste of space (unless you're going to partition 10GB of it and use the rest as a share drive). I'd use the 8.4GB as the OS drive and use the 200GB and the 320GB for your shares.

EDIT: I did notice you wanted a local portage server. I hope you have alot of bandwidth to keep everything updated and have absolutely no CAPs on your internet service. I'm using an old P233MMX for that task with a 15GB drive (NFS Shared). It's not an entire Portage mirror, but it keeps the downloaded packages on itself (mounted as /usr/portage via NFS).

----------

## Shining Arcanine

 *Simba7 wrote:*   

> Mostly because after running the system for a year, I've only used 1/3 of the space, including log files.. on a 2GB Quantum Hard Drive. Of course, I'm also running btrfs with the compression turned on.
> 
> A 200GB would be severe overkill.. and a major waste of space (unless you're going to partition 10GB of it and use the rest as a share drive). I'd use the 8.4GB as the OS drive and use the 200GB and the 320GB for your shares.
> 
> EDIT: I did notice you wanted a local portage server. I hope you have alot of bandwidth to keep everything updated and have absolutely no CAPs on your internet service. I'm using an old P233MMX for that task with a 15GB drive (NFS Shared). It's not an entire Portage mirror, but it keeps the downloaded packages on itself (mounted as /usr/portage via NFS).

 

My old Dell computer only has two drive bays, so I can only have two drives in it unless I either do something with the 3.5" or 5.25" drive bays or come up with some other solution. I plan to store my backups using scp, so I could probably just scp them to the root drive, or would that be a bad idea?

As for bandwidth, I have a 25Mbps symmetric fiber connection from Verizon. I believe that Verizon's bandwidth is unmetered. Is that sufficient to operate a private mirror?

----------

