Promise FastTrak 4650 on opensuse11

[NhatPhongTran]

Hi!

I just bought a Promise FastTrak 4650 RAID controller which I intended to use for a 4 HDD RAID 10 array. My system runs on opensuse11 64bit. Now I got the very annoying problem, that I don't got any drivers for opensuse11 to get the raid being recognized. The drivers on the homepage are for suse10 or rhel5, but no opensuse11. Since I'm still new to all this, I'd appreciate any help how to get the appropriate drivers running on opensuse11.

Thank you very much!


Phong

NhatPhongTran wrote:

> I just bought a Promise FastTrak 4650 RAID controller which I intended
> to use for a 4 HDD RAID 10 array. My system runs on opensuse11 64bit.
> Now I got the very annoying problem, that I don't got any drivers for
> opensuse11 to get the raid being recognized. The drivers on the homepage
> are for suse10 or rhel5, but no opensuse11. Since I'm still new to all
> this, I'd appreciate any help how to get the appropriate drivers running
> on opensuse11.

First, you got what it is called a "fakeraid" card. These cards need a
manufacturer driver to properly being recognized and handled by the system.

Good literature about this can be found here:

http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Hardware/sata.html
http://linux-ata.org/faq-sata-raid.html

In this case you have 2 options:

a) Try to configure, setup and install the provider's driver which is
usually a hard task

b) Try with pure linux software raid (called "md" or "dm") to manage raid
levels. There is no need to get a raid card, standard disks and non-raid
setup are enough.

If you don't have a hardware raid card, I would recommend to avoid option a)
and go with md. openSUSE wiki has some tips:

http://en.opensuse.org/How_to_instal..._software_RAID

Greetings,

--
Camaleón