Driver for Promise FastTrack TX8660, TX4660, TX8668

[IcarusR]

Been following this thread, but not had any positive input so kept quiet.

braky

My current homeserver Fedora/Ubuntu has 6 satadisks connected on the mainbord (1bootdisk 160GB and 5 x 1TB in raid5 mdadm) + 1-port Sil3531 (esata) + 8-port TX8660 and 5 x 2TB WD 20EARS

Thats some home server you've got there !! Makes mine look simple, which it is, with 2 x 1TB WD green drives (on a 2 port 3Ware hardware raid mirror) & a 100Gb boot drive.
Will have to upgrade soon as am running out of space for my music collection.

How do you keep the server cool with all those disks in it ??

[joerg_ac]

Hi,

I missed to use depmod. It seems to "re-register" all modules in the /lib/modules/<kernal>/ subtree.

After that I can refer to the module by its name (t8sas) in modprobe and modinfo.

To load it automatically I added t8sas to /etc/modules

I guess I have a look into module-assistant now in order to handle this driver automatically.

best regards, Joerg

[braky]

No heat problems, all the drives are WD green and they run all at 36C, 39C on heavy disk access.
I have 2 backplanes of 5 disks each and each backplane is custom cooled by a silent 80mm fan.
The 2 noname backplanes are (5 x 3.5" Hard Disks) like the IcyBox IB-555SK.
Just make sure that you use backplanes with 80mm fans, and not 2x 40mm. These 40mm tend to make more noise. But the stock 80mmm also makes a lot of noise, so I replaced them with a silent papst fan 80mmx15mm. The server is feeding my PCH-C200 and is whisper silent and cool.

I also started my first raid with 2x 500Gb (synology ds207+), but it just keeps on growing... Video takes a lot of space, maybe I shouldn't have digitized all my dvd and bluray

Cheers

[joerg_ac]

@ IcarusR

I am building a new server now, which might soon have a higher number of disks. I was also worries about the cooling although the disks are also green ones (Samsung HD203WI). I am using the Lian Li case PC-B70. It has 5 external 5.25" bays plus 7 internal 3.5" bays in the front behind two big fans, plus 3 more 3.5" internal disk bays in the back above the mainboard. All disks are installed with fans next to them and with some space between each other. So it has space for 10 well cooled disks and can even be extended using the 5 external bays if more is needed.

best regards, Joerg

[braky]

Joerg,

I contacted support today and did not even receive the driver to compile myself.
NO linux support sir, Suse and Redhat only.
SO I didn't bother any further...

Hmm, this will be my first and last promise controller, I promise!

Is there like a kind of driver page/site where I can put this driver on for other people using the TX8660 ?

PS Installed the webpam interface also but it doesn't provide detailed smart data like temperature of the drives, which is a pitty.

Cheers

[joerg_ac]

Braky,

I thin the same about promise now. To me, they seem to be at least ten years behind the competition when it comes to Linux support. I think I might go for a different card now and sell the promise card. We have a driver now, but what about updates and support in the future. I do not want to risk to be without a driver again in the future.

That we have a driver now is only because I was lucky to get somebody on the phone who does not tell me the official "not supported" reply. I also wonder how their support for Redhat and SUSE enterprise servers would work with driver modules generated only against a particular kernel version. Do they really think there will never be security updates and bug-fixes in those kernels.

I had a look already at other products and I found for example the Intel SASUC8I. It has also a reasonable prize comparable to the one we have from Promise and it seems to be supported by Ubuntu and many other Linux versions out of the box due to its LSI SAS1068E Chip. There is the mptsas driver module, which should work. Can somebody confirm this? This card does not support RAID5, but I anyway plan to go for a software raid. When deciding what to buy I had these two options and I did go for the wrong one.

I have not decided yet how to proceed from now, but I do not really trust the current solution based on this promise driver.

best regards, Joerg

[joerg_ac]

Braky,

me again. I was so upset about Promise that I did forget to answer your question.

I am not sure where to upload it. Does this Forum have space for something like this. I could attach the driver sources to this thread. However I am not so sure about the license and i do not want to cause trouble to this board.

I think the Driver said something about being GPL, but i am not sure if this implies the included binary object can also be distributed. On the other hand they did give it to me for free without any restrictions I am aware of.

Can a board admin comment on this?

Perfect would be to get this driver as a package together with Ubuntu. I am new to this kind of questions, but can this be done based on the partial-open source driver I got from Promise?

best regards, Joerg

[braky]

I looked also at the LSI SAS1068E Chip based cards, but found to many problems on the forums with stability with mdadm and smartctl.
I'm keeping this card (bought it on ebay for half price)
My video server is not connected to the internet and I just use it as storage so kernel updates are no issue. I just need a stable NFS / CIFS server to stream video.

It is a shame that there are no cheap mainbords with 8 or more sata onboard...

Cheers

[joerg_ac]

Hi again,

I wrote a couple of emails to Promise support in Germany and Taiwan to make them aware of this thread and to invite them to join in this discussion. let's see if somebody shows up here. I would be very interested in a n statement from Promise.

To me it seems so easy for Promise to significantly improve the Linux support. Just put the latest driver sources on the server for download. Promise anyway has such a driver package. If they would also allow to include this into Linux distributions being provided as driver packages, the situation would change from practically no reasonable support to something I could very well accept. It is also Ok with me that the driver is partly binary. Many graphic card drivers seem to be distributed similarly. I would be very happy with this kind of support.

Regarding being safe in the future:
I guess if I set up a software raid with Linux, the adapter can be replaced by any model that presents the disks as JBOD later without loosing the software RAID. Is this correct?

best regards, Joerg

[braky]

That's correct. I just put my software raid 5x1TB drives from the mainboard sata to the tx8660 for testing purposes.
Booted the server and the software raid starts up without any problems.
That's the reason I went for software raid so I don't run in problems when my controller dies.
There's a file system check running now and after that I'm going to remove a disk from the controller and check how mdadm reacts.

Cheers