[H-GEN] RAID-1 and Promise FastTrak 100TX2 controllers

[David de Groot]

Hi All,

I have a Promise FastTrak 100TX2  (2 port ATA "raid" card).
I'm running SuSE 9.1 with the 2.6.5-7.111-smp kernel. The card is
detected as using the PDC20270  chipset.

Until recently I was using it purely as an ATA-100 controller for my
aged dual proc. celeron system. It had a single 80Gb Seagate drive on
the primary channel.

With time, the we became increasingly worried about potential drive
failure, so we've bought a second 80Gb Seagate drive and I've attached
it to the secondary channel on the promise controller.  I even went as
far as defining a mirror array and adding the second drive to it
(duplicating the contents of the first drive with the Promise BIOS utility).

Now here's the problem. The 2.6 kernel doesn't seem to have the ataraid
module anymore (2.4.x did) and the Promise drivers on the Promise site
are written for 2.4.x also.

A bit of googling shows some fairly old posts on lkml about there being
no ataraid support for this card of the HPT cards, but those posts dated
from Nov'ish 2003. Thus what I need to know is:  is there a way in the
2.6.5 kernel to use the raid array as per defined in the promise bios ?
or should I configure software raid-1 ? and if I do, will it trash my
existing data[0] ?  or will a cron'd rsync do (and what will the promise
card think of that on the next reboot[1]) ?

I've mounted the second drive as ro to check if mirroring was occurring
and the timestamps on recently changed files don't match (the second
drive having timestamps of when the original duplication was done), so
I'm positive there's no mirroring occurring right now (much to my
annoyance).

And yes, if I had the money I'd ditch the promise card and buy a 3ware
one, but it's just not going to happen in the foreseeable future.

Dave
[0] most of which is backed up - most being the operative word there.
[1] few and far between but they do happen, esp. for kernel security
patches.