skaven04
02-07-2001, 10:57 PM
I'm planning on using a bunch of my old IDE hard drives in a software-RAID array in linux-mandrake. I'll be running the system on a dual PPro 200 system with 64MB of memory. The main thing is that 4 IDE channels is simply not enough. I want to get a $19 Promise ATA33 PCI IDE controller to add an extra four channels to the system. Are the drivers for this card already in the 7.1 release of Mandrake? If not, how would I go about installing them? (I've never recompiled my kernel before...)
Before people start posting, I want to point out that I am quite aware of the performance hits I'm going to take by using both the master and slave channels of each IDE controller, and also that yes, ATA66 is faster than ATA33. I know that. But I'm using odl 540MB and 1GB drives that are barely Mode 4-compliant. The system is going to be for an MP3 server (but not an FTP server) and as such speedy drive access isn't really an issue. I'm also aware that there are hardware RAID solutions available, but I don't want to spend that much money. I also know about SCSI...which is also too expensive for me. The plan I'm going for right now will cost me about $30. That fits quite nicely into my budget to get a linear RAID array of >40GB.
With that out of the way, any tips on installing/configuring a Promise ATA33 IDE controller would be most helpful. Thanks!
Before people start posting, I want to point out that I am quite aware of the performance hits I'm going to take by using both the master and slave channels of each IDE controller, and also that yes, ATA66 is faster than ATA33. I know that. But I'm using odl 540MB and 1GB drives that are barely Mode 4-compliant. The system is going to be for an MP3 server (but not an FTP server) and as such speedy drive access isn't really an issue. I'm also aware that there are hardware RAID solutions available, but I don't want to spend that much money. I also know about SCSI...which is also too expensive for me. The plan I'm going for right now will cost me about $30. That fits quite nicely into my budget to get a linear RAID array of >40GB.
With that out of the way, any tips on installing/configuring a Promise ATA33 IDE controller would be most helpful. Thanks!