Promise FastTrak S150 SX4-M

HiTech69 · Posted: Fri Mar 18, 2005 9:13 pm Post subject: Promise FastTrak S150 SX4-M

Having searched the Internet and finding conflicting results regarding this card, I figured I'd come here looking for some insight into getting this card working.

Apparently, to start with, there is a SX4 and a SX4-M. The SX4-M has a XOR engine in it, but not one found on a 64-bit card. So, it's fake raid. I can accept that, driver driven raid with some hardware speed-ups works fine for a 32-bit card. There appears to be driver support for n00bs that still use that other OS or the one that looks just like that other OS, but it's for 2.4.20-8 or something lame like that.

The kernel (2.6.11's) provide sata_sx4, which in theory would work, but I have yet to see this in practice. My results include getting device recognition but no drive access. DriveSeekReady errors or something to that fact. I have tried doing RAID on the card, and no RAID, just to see if it would play nice like a normal SATA card. So, seeing that the driver that supposedly has some support for this card won't even let it run the basics kinda gets me concerned. I'm not dependant on this card at this time, as I have substituted a standard SATA card from Adaptec to get the system going and doing some nightly rsync's instead of full time mirroring with software RAID.

So, my question to the general populous and developers here is, has anyone successfully gotten this card to work on an x86 system either straight or as it's fake raid with a 2.6.x kernel? If so, could you provide some insight in this post as how you did it (versions, patches, etc). Hopefully we can be descriptive enough to have a google hit on this topic that others can learn from. Thanks in advance!

derheld42 · Posted: Wed Mar 30, 2005 1:47 am Post subject:

Help me out here...
There's hardware RAID and software RAID... Are you saying that you can run a hardware RAID card in software RAID mode? (RAID is kinda new to me at this point)

Also, are there any updates on support for the FASTRAK SX4-M?

snIP3r · l33t Joined: 21 May 2004 Posts: 853 Location: germany

@derheld42:
after reading some posts about the promise s150 sx4 i think that the kernel 2.6.x does only provide the discs to be displayed. and does _not_ provide the hardware raid functionality of the controller. but these posts concern the 2.6.3 kernel.

so my question is the same as hitech69's:

does the 2.6.11 kernel support the hardware raid functionality of the s150 sx4???

greets
snIPer
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KingDaveRa · n00b Joined: 31 May 2003 Posts: 40 Location: Bucks, UK

Very doubtful.

Promise are being very difficult about technical specs and their RAID interfaces, so with their controllers its a case of using JBOD or not using it at all.

I had two SX4 controllers in some HP servers, and the driver support was for older versions of SuSE and Redhat, or nothing at all.

I ended up using software raid.

kiksen · Guru Joined: 24 Jun 2002 Posts: 401 Location: Denmark

Hi.

If you download the linux driver package from www.promise.com, there's a partial source directory allowing you to compile for the kernel at hand. I've successfully compiled with gentoo-sources-2.6.12-r10.

HTH.

/kiksen

Scouby · n00b Joined: 03 Aug 2004 Posts: 14

Hi,

PietdeBoer · Posted: Mon Dec 26, 2005 12:36 pm Post subject:

i've bought this card ( sx4-m ) planning to use it as a raid5 controller..

havent got it working yet.. now going to try the partical source

hope it gives some new hope!
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Scouby · n00b Joined: 03 Aug 2004 Posts: 14

Good. Please post your feedback here.
Good luck!

point3 · n00b Joined: 03 Nov 2004 Posts: 40

PietdeBoer · Posted: Sat Mar 22, 2008 11:08 pm Post subject:

no luck yet, will try it later this week on a new serv ..

cheers
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PietdeBoer · Posted: Sat Apr 05, 2008 6:53 pm Post subject:

i gave up, installed my gentoo on a software raid5 array and it works like a charm
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