Changing from HPT66 to Promise?

[Mike V 0]

I am sick of this HotRod ATA66 controller. I keep getting errors in my event log, nobody knows how to resolve it. Not even Abit or Highpoint has gotten back to me. I have tried every combination of drivers and bios for the thing, and I still get these errors. Now, performance is good, but these errors are unacceptable. My friend is selling his brand new Promise ATA66 card, and I just wanted to hookup my drives to it and go. Is this possible? Do I have to reformat them with the Promise? They are IBM DPTA 20gig drives, and have been rock solid since I got them 1 month ago. Any ideas?

 

Mike

[Super Fly 0]

Man...if you have 2x20gb drives and you are getting a promise, raid 0 those things...they will fly. Just need to do the raid hack on the card...check out the www.arstechnica.com forums for a description of how to...really easy. I don't know if striping involves formatting. If you don't feel like striping, no format required. If the controller works, the drives should work.

[GrannyPantyRaider 0]

Worked wonderfully for me! Got 2 maxtor 13.6 7200 rpm drives on a mod'd Ultra66 card.

All I can say is FAST!

 

All it took was a 4 sec bios flash on the controoler card and 2 mins to solder the resister between a pin on the bios and the ground on the card. (Dont ask me what pin number cause I dont know. I just followed the pic.)

 

Got a second one right in front of me waiting to be operated on. I might either sitck it in my server with 2 20 gigs or I just give to my friend so he can put his drives on it and have some RAID fun of his own.

 

Though I think I might make him mod it hiself. Why should I keep the fun away from him!

 

GPR.

[Mike V 0]

Thanks guys, but I really want to know, can I just pull out my HR66, put in the Promise, connect my drives and bootup? What is the procedure? I know that 2000 has built in Promise drivers, but will my system even boot?

 

Mike

[Ge0ph 0]

Yes you can!! I got feed up with the HPT66 on my BP6 and went out and bought a Promise Ultra66.

Here's what I did:

 

Put the Promise in a slot.

 

Boot W2k, it installed drivers all by it's self.

 

Hooked my hard drives to the Promise card.

 

That's it, no reinstall, not even a driver hunt, it just works.

 

I have a Promise Fasttrack(33) laying around and it was great. If I had two same 66 drives I would do the hack too. I might just buy two same hard drives because I know RAID rocks!!

[Greggy 0]

If your using Windows 9x, then yes: your OS can fall back on DOS compatabilty mode and still boot up. You can then load on the correct drivers and away you go. However, if you want to setup RAID with two or more drives you will need to create the partition using the Promises BIOS utils... and a complete rebuild will be on the menu.

 

If your using NT4 or 2000 then no: your OS will NOT recognise the new controller (and the hard disk drive) automatically, you'll get a BSOD Stop Error: Inaccessible Boot Device. You can install the new Promise ATA66 IDE controller card and install the correct driver whilst still operating off the HPT366, then attempt to see if it boots up once you've swapped the hard disk over to the Promise ATA66... But I have no experience doing this, and I don't think it will work. And even if it does, I'd bet you'll want to RAID it anyway, and then your back to rebuilding from scratch anyway (see above).

[APV_SAV 0]

does the promise use up irq?

[Ogi 0]

just a comment -

i have a promise fasttrack 66 with 2 maxtor drives (66/20gig/7200). well it works fine under win2k - but the performance is about HALF of the performance unter nt4!!!

a friend of mine has the same problem (25 mb/sec. max instead of 40-50 mb/sec max. transfer under winbench)...

let's hope that this issue will be solved in their next drivers (and soon!!!).

[Mike V 0]

I booted up with the Promise, Windows 2000 installed the driver for it, and then I removed the old card, moved the Promise to that slot, hooked up the drives, and it works great!

 

Thanks!

 

Mike

[Skywise 0]

FYI - Promise and maxtors don't mix very well... just check the discussion board at storagereview for more info

[GrannyPantyRaider 0]

I use Maxtor drives and noticed a vast improvment in speed. I used 32K block size in the controller setup. That seemed to work best for people. I dug through several forums and yes people were having problems but after a clean install things worked out fine. Also there was alot of buzz about benchmarking software not being accurate with the raid controller. Some dude on Ars-Technica's board had a program that came from Promise that ran in dos to benchmark the drives. Try that forum, I think I saw the names of one or two programs that bench the card correctly.

[Mike V 0]

There is a controller setup screen for the Promise, like a BIOS type setup screen?

 

How did you set the block size?

 

If there is, how do I access it?

 

Thanks,

Mike

[GrannyPantyRaider 0]

Ya gotta hit ctrl-F at after the IDE detect screen then when you do the array setup there is an option for Block size underneath the array assignments. Upper half of the screen to the right. If you did Auto-setup then you have 64k cause thats what it defaults to.