I gotta ATA100 raid card

[tomatoeboy]

Ooo, ooo. I've not installed it yet but I saw it in Maplins for 20 quid so thought I might give it a go especially considering Maplins generous unwanted item return guarentee (though I have a sneaking suspicion that this might be excluded).

It's not a promise so I expect to be shouted at by RRLedford , but it does come with software to run raid...not that I've enough drive space/spare drives to do it at the moment.

The card is a CMD technologies card based on a Silicon Images (a trading name of CMD?) 0649 chip. I supports ATA 100 (I think there is a 133 version available but I don't need it) & it will get me off the HPt at last. Initial searches suggest that it may be supported in the Linux kernel (what version though I'm not sure ) & it comes with it's own drivers & raid software for win2k. I don't think there is any software at the moment that allows raid in linux so it's just as well I shalln't be using it.

I shall install tomorrow morning & see whether everything works & whether the scores improve in the Performance Test software I benchedmarked my current setup with earlier today.

I shall post the results of my endevours in the near future.

[tomatoeboy]

Well I got it installed without too many problems. It wouldn't work in Pci slot 4 because it was having a bit of a tiff with the SBLive in PCI 5. Moved it to the empty 3 slot & everything appears to be hunky dory. Comparisons of scores show a 50% increase in sequential read & write functions but only a slight increase in random seek, read & rewrite.

Decided to see if I could push the FSB any further than the 82MHz that I was currently on and seem to have done something wierd to my win2k installation. It didn't work at 93MHz (600MHz on the cele's) I got a "winnt/SYSTEM is corrupt" message on the black part of the 2k boot screen so I dropped it back to 66 & now it'll go through the black bit & then reboot.

Plus it's no longer recognising the DVD drive that I put on the HPT.

Booting into linux things are working OK. I'm assuming there is either some generic support for PCI cards or I somehow managed to install drivers/kernal modules for the controller when I first installed linux as it works. Seems a bit slow & sluggish though. Managed to completely lock up my machine on reboot I force a file system check & then harddrake detects the fact that I've got a USB chip & configures that. So now I have no DVD drive but I do have for the 1st time access to my usb printer.

Wonder if I can get it all to work at once Anyone know anything about linux support for these sorts of cards? I've not found anything yet but I'm still looking.