Hi everybody. I just bought a new PC which I use for number crunching. Since I need to do I/O on very large files, I decided to go for two SATA drive configured as RAID 0. I bought a Dell Dimension 8300, with two 120GB drives. I haven' been able to know the details of my configuration before having it in my hands (something doesn't work well between Dell sales dept. and their laboratories here in Italy, they were really imbarassed but they where unable to give me any detail except those present on their website ;-) ). Now I'm in that situation: -Intel i875P chipset (which, AFAIK, has two SATA slots and should be able to do (hardware?) RAID 0) -Promise Fasttrak S150 TX2plus PCI controller, where the two SATA hds are actually attached. No standard ATA hds.
RedHat 9: 'officially' supported, installs using the driver I downloaded from the Promise website. Mandrake 9.2: doesn't recognize the drive. I'd like to install Gentoo on that PC (or, at least, avoid to be forced to keep RH only because it's the only distro supporting that controller). My questions are: 1) Does anybody have some experience with the same Intel MB/Promise controller? 2) Did anyone succeed in installing Gentoo on it, maybe using kernel 2.6 or the source code version of Promise driver (available 'as is' on their website)? 3) Could it be a good idea to get rid of the Promise controller and directly connect the drives to the MB and try to recognise the Intel ICH5/R controller (I heard that kernel 2.6 should do the job)? I know these questions are rather confused, but I can't mess up too much with that PC (it's already happily crunching numbers) so I'd like to have an idea of what I'm doing before telling my roommates 'Ok, backup all your data 'cause I need to format drives/reinstall OS/etc...'. I'm not in a hurry (as a temporary solution, RH does everything I need) so even suggestions like 'Wait some time for better support / newer kernel' are welcome. Thanks in advance Arturo di Gioia -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list
