[plug] Promise Fastrack 66 ide raid controller.

[Wayne G]

To Jason..... and others...

My reports are pretty good. Faster than a scsi-uw drive.

How much would a 25 meg scsi UW HDD and controller cost ???

Besides, for home/desktop use (not server) the price is extremely viable. If
the article I read is correct, I can do the ide raid controller for $70 ( how
much is a scsi one ???) and 4 x 6.4 gig hdd's @ $189 each. 

That is less than $1000 for 30-40meg xfers with 25 gig storage. 

As for "hogging" I would assume the card should take care of this... According
to the data sheet it is bus mastering and supports multitasking while doing
data xfer.

You tell me the economics...

But I need to know if I can run this under linux....

Wayne.


On Tue, 07 Mar 2000, Jason Nicholls wrote:
> G'day Wayne,
> 
> > The reason I ask this is an article at slashdot. Apparently this card is the
> > same as an ultra 66 card (Promise also) except for bios and 1 resistor location
> > !! The fastrack is nearly $300 and the ultra66 is $70..... Big difference.
> 
> I remember reading an article which was doing performance testing of
> this
> raid controller (maybe the Ultra33, not Ultra66) and it wasn't really
> worth
> it. The speed increase over software IDE raid was minimal and
> regardless, 
> IDE hogs the CPU. Depending on the situation, if you need raid but don't
> have
> the financials they go software raid with IDE disks or SCSI disks,
> otherwise
> try hardware raid using SCSI.
> 
> I'd do more research before making a purchase...
> 
> 
> Regards,
> 
> Jason Nicholls