FastTrak S150 with BP6, go? no go?

magenois · Post by **magenois** » Thu Jun 03, 2004 10:15 am

Hello!

I was going to buy a promise FastTrak S150 SATA controler with two 160GB drive for my BP6 server.

I seen a number of post from people having difficulties using Promise adapter with the BP6. Before buying I just want to ensure that these problems are the exceptions and not the rules.

So any comments from people who had success using this card with a BP6?

thanks!

Dave Rave · Post by **Dave Rave** » Thu Jun 03, 2004 10:31 am

probs with promise adaptors ??
there is long held beliefs that the on-board HighPoint controller is not good.
don't rely on it.
but I don't think much has been denigrated towards 'any' pci plug-in as yet ....
I have a cheapy ata100 raid, i might try that....

InactiveX · Post by **InactiveX** » Thu Jun 03, 2004 2:48 pm

Hello there magenois!

Has anybody tried a SATA adaptor on the BP6 yet?

BCN · Post by **BCN** » Thu Jun 03, 2004 7:46 pm

I have never heard any probs with promise... I am usinf ATA133TX2 without ANY problem for already 2 years 24/7....

Dave Rave · Post by **Dave Rave** » Sat Jun 05, 2004 1:43 am

I found some ata100 Aralion RAID cards in a bargain bin ....

pci 3, worked, detected drives, not able to save raid info back to drives. always booted as JBOD.
pci 2 / 4 , system hang on os boot screen.

many hours, total rubbish, cheap ass korean shit.

though, I will try them in the i810 board I have still idle waiting to be resurrected.

RRLedford · Post by **RRLedford** » Tue Jun 08, 2004 2:11 am

I have a S150-TX4 four-channel 32-bit PCI SATA Promise card in my new Dell 600SC server ($329 with 128M/20G on sale). With its cache memory and RAID capability I can tell you that it is a total overmatch to the BP6's slow bus speed. In fact, a PCI bus running at 133MHz is even a choke point for these controllers. The PCI 64 bit slots dont even keep up. Only PCI-X and eventually PCI-Express are well matched to the high bandwidth output of these controllers. My Dell 600SC would only do about 30MB per second with a RAID5 setup. With RAID 0+2 and a pair of Maxtor 80G/8M/7200 SATS drives it benched at near 65MB/S. I know that these controllers dont allow manual resource & I/O address assignment, making them weak on compatibility with systems like the BP6.

BCN · Post by **BCN** » Tue Jun 08, 2004 7:44 am

out of topic, but what is RAID5??

Dave Rave · Post by **Dave Rave** » Tue Jun 08, 2004 8:13 am

raid5 is better than raid0 or raid1
do a google on raid options and read up on it
think it's raid 1 + 0 in a multi mirror multi stripe with redundant mode

RRLedford · Post by **RRLedford** » Tue Jun 08, 2004 10:04 am

RAID0 has much less overhead moving data on/off the drives, since it does not have the parity calculations that are needed for the redundancy of the RAID5, 3-drive scheme. Raw throughput is often 2-3 times faster.

magenois · Post by **magenois** » Tue Jun 08, 2004 7:38 pm

Just to let you know, the FastTrask S150 and the SATA drives work like a charm in the BP6.

I can get transfer speed around 75MB/sec which does not compare to modern motherboard controler speed but it is still twice faster than the on board controler.

thanks for all your advice

davd_bob · Post by **davd_bob** » Wed Jun 09, 2004 12:17 am

RAID = Random Array Inexpensive Disks=making a single "drive" on the pc...but uses more then 1 physical disk.
PROs = good attributes
CONs = bad attributes

RAID0 = stripe set without parity = all physical disks run side by side at the same time.
PROs = very fast. the pc doesn't know that and when it asks for data from the "drive" if the data is sspread across 2 or 3 disks it gets retrieved 2 or 3 times as fast.
CONs = if data gets corrupted or a failure occurs on one physical disk all data on all disks is usually lost.

RAID5 = stripe set with parity = all physical disks run side by side at the same time...but one is used for parity to safe guard the data in event one physical drive fails.
PROs = still very fast but not as fast as RAID0. if one physical disk fails the system will slow down but not loose data. when the bad physical disk is replaced the system will re-load the data on it then go back to full speed
CONs = needs at least 3 or more physical drives...and one will be used only for parity/data protection.

purrkur · Post by **purrkur** » Wed Jun 09, 2004 2:48 am

davd_bob: Good summary!

Dave rave: RAID 5 is only better than RAID 0 in that it is redundant. It is not possible to compare RAID 5 to RAID 1 because RAID 1 is mirroring only. RAID 0 is faster than RAID 5 in any given situation since RAID 5 is basically RAID 0 with added overhead (see davd_bob's post).

RAID 0 with RAID 1 (sometimes called RAID 01 or RAID 10 or even something like striped mirroring) is considered faster than RAID 5 but will require a large amount of disks. If you want fast disk writes then RAID 0 is the way to go.

Also, another theory behind RAID. People think it automatically gives them better performance. In many cases it is not true. For example, you got a web server running RAID 0 (for example). In this web server, 70% of the files are 20kbytes in size or smaller. Your stripe size is set to 50Kbytes. This effectively means that all files that are under 50kbytes are written to a single disk and the advantage of RAID is lost.

RAID is excellent when it comes to such things as video editing because getting large files to and from disk is crucial to the overall speed of your video application.

BCN · Post by **BCN** » Wed Jun 09, 2004 5:32 am

OK, so i got it, I have onboard Promise fastrack 20378 controller - for 2 SATA and 2 ATA133 drives.

at the moment I have Raid 0 on 2 160Gb SATA drives, there is a capability for making a RAID 0+1 configuration through all 4 drives.

How would I do just adding two ATA133 drives? would I loose the data on the existing drives or would it mirror by itself.

Besides, would it matter where would it mirror from, I mean SATA is faster than ATA133...

purrkur · Post by **purrkur** » Wed Jun 09, 2004 5:41 am

BCN: If you want to mirror those drives then you have to find two 160GB drives for the mirror to work!

What OS are you using? I guess mirroring depends on your software (if you are doing software mirroring instead of hardware - but I guess that is the case for you). I assume that if you are running MS stuff then they will take care of the mirroring stuff once you set it up, but I am not sure.

BCN · Post by **BCN** » Wed Jun 09, 2004 12:08 pm

I think it would be harware mirroring, because I am not aware of any software mirring...

, cause it is RAID 0,1,0+1 chipset ans allows RAID setups for stripe and mirroring through SATA and PATA drives.

yeah I would have to get 2 more drives, which would be PATA, so I mean would I have to reinstall and back up everything or I just stuck them up, configure the array as RAID 0+1 and they would mirror by themselves?

I just do not have the space to back up all....

BP6.Com

FastTrak S150 with BP6, go? no go?

FastTrak S150 with BP6, go? no go?

Quick update