Michael Thon mrthon@verizon.net wrote:
Greetings - I'm looking to put some cheap storage into my server, which is running centos 3. I'm looking at the Maxtor SATA/150 PCI Card and a big maxtor sata drive.
Multiple sources list this as an OEM'd Promise PDC20375 (FastTrak TX2).
The kicker is the older kernel, I don't think support is included (I'll look when I have time). I've never tried patching with the GPL driver, but it should be possible on 2.4.21.
I would like to make sure that CentOS has driver for this controller.
Promise finally got enough nags that it released the driver as GPL in 2003. So it certainly builds on kernel 2.4. I've just never checked for compatibility, as I largely avoid Promise in general.
I looked in Red Hat's hardware database and did some oogle'ing but I couldn't find any info to confirm that this card is compatible. Any ideas where else to look?
Grab the SRPM and install it. Then cd to /usr/src/redhat/SPEC and prep the tree with "rpmbuild -bp kernel-2.4.spec". Now look in /usr/src/redhat/BUILD at the kernel tree -- either just at files for IDE, or possibly do a quick config and see if it's listed under SATA support. It will be "Promise FastTrak TX2".
If I have time, I'll do so tonight.
If you want absolute compatibility plus managability (and a reliability option) for a few bucks more, the 2-channel SATA 3Ware Escalade 8006-2 is under $150. Since it's going in a server, it can't hurt to have the future option of RAID-1 by merely adding another drive.