Promise ATA100/133 PCI Controller

[mindwave]

I admit I am a data junkie, back in the "net-dos" days I actually had 11 PC's hooked up by rs-232 cables so that I could have as much data and as many hard drives, "online and available" as I could.

 

Now I'm on Mandriva on 75% of my home PC's.

 

I have recently started working w/ a "file server" w/ MDV and with 1 dvd and 3 HD's I need some more room.

 

Lucky me I have 2 more PATA drives laying around.

 

unfortunately i dont have any more IDE channels on the MB

 

BUT! I also have an old (3 years?) Promise IDE ATA100/133 PCI board that would allow me to load 4 more PATA drives in that same box (YUM!)

 

When I used it in my win2k server it was plug and play.

 

is there anything I need to know about setting it up in MDV?

Can I just plug it in load MCC and repartition the drives?

 

would a clean install work better?

 

I am NOT interested in setting them up in RAID, although the board will support that.

 

Any comments or crticizms would be appreciated.

 

Thanks

 

J

[jkerr82508]

I used one of those for many years. On linux it was plug and play. IIRC on Win2k I had to install drivers for it, but my memory could be faulty, or it may have been a different version of the board.

 

I recall someone having problems when a similar board was used in a system with both SATA and IDE on-board controllers, but can't recall the details.

 

Jim

Edited June 27, 2008 by jkerr82508

[scarecrow]

Same here- I can recall having it working right out of the box with Mandrake 9.2 and 2.4.X kernels. last time I used it was with Debian Sarge, and it worked right out of the box, again.

[pmpatrick]

I'm using one right now with no problems on mandriva 2008 and 2008.1. Drives on the card are designated in the hdx format, not sdx like on some distros. Those distros where ide drives are designated sdx are using the newer libata where all ide drives are now being run under the scsi protocol. With certain 2.6 kernels, the implementation for the promise controller in libata is very buggy although that seems to be fixed in the most recent 2.6.25 kernels. At any rate, the mandirva kernels and hardware detection are configured to use legacy ide modules on the promise controllers and those work fine. Just note that you could have potential problems on other distros that use libata for the promise controller drives.