Promise Ultra 100 TX2 ?

profdlpprofdlp The Holy City Of Westlake, Ohio
edited August 2003 in Hardware
I received a Promise Ultra 100 TX2 ATA-100 controller with a new hard drive. Since I don't need it for my computer, I was thinking of putting it in my girlfriends machine. The main reason for doing this would be to keep her two hard drives, DVD player, and CD Burner all on seperate channels. She has an Asus A7A266 board.

1) Should I expect a performance hit, performance Improvement, or should things be about equal?

2) Are there any problems I should anticipate with installing XPpro? The boot drive will run from the controller.

3) I have an Asus A7V133 board and an Asus A7V board in two other computers. Both have the on-board Promise Ultra 100 raid controller. The A7V isn't too bad, but the A7V133 has got to be the slowest booting computer I have ever owned. This is largely due to the long pause while the so-called "Speed Bios" is loading and detecting drives. Is this PCI controller card likely to slow down the boot process significantly?

She is not into gaming, benchmarks, cutting-edge, or anything like that. She just wants her computer to be stable, and a satisfactory performer. The two hard drives will be ATA-100 or ATA-133 WD drives (2MB cache).

What do you think?


Prof :wave:

Comments

  • TheSmJTheSmJ
    edited August 2003
    If she just wants a stable system, and things are running fine as it, there is not reason to complicate things by adding something that could potentially mess things up, and in turn piss of your girlfriend.

    "If it aint broke, don't fix it."
  • profdlpprofdlp The Holy City Of Westlake, Ohio
    edited August 2003
    ...I'm getting ready to do a planned format anyway. She's running 98se right now and will be going to XPpro. I am also putting two new drives in there, so even in the event of total disater I could just yank the new controller & drives out and stick her old drive back in there. The potential to "mess things up" already exists.

    I agree with you in principle 100%. :thumbup


    Prof
  • a2jfreaka2jfreak Houston, TX Member
    edited August 2003
    Sounds like you're already decided on what to do.

    As for the speed issue, I can't see it decreasing performance whenever multipe drives are in use. Even if the card is slower than the onboard headers, it almost has to be faster than using 2 devices that are on the same header. Using the card lets you have 1 device per header. :thumbsup: I'd split it up if I had the opportunity.
    profdlp said
    ...I'm getting ready to do a planned format anyway. She's running 98se right now and will be going to XPpro. I am also putting two new drives in there, so even in the event of total disater I could just yank the new controller & drives out and stick her old drive back in there. The potential to "mess things up" already exists.

    I agree with you in principle 100%. :thumbup


    Prof
  • profdlpprofdlp The Holy City Of Westlake, Ohio
    edited August 2003
    The format and upgrade to XPpro is definitely a go. I've always vastly preferred avoiding the Master/Slave business, since I feel that it cripples both drives on that channel.

    I guess what I'm looking for is someone to tell me if running an XP boot drive off a controller card has big installation issues.
    I never could get Win2000 installed on the A7V unless I put the boot drive on the regular IDE controller. (And never felt like messing around with trying to ghost it over after the install was done, since it was a secondary computer).

    XPpro installed fine on the on-board Promise Ultra 100 on the A7V, though.

    Thanks for the good input! :thumbsup:


    Prof
  • a2jfreaka2jfreak Houston, TX Member
    edited August 2003
    I'd definitely use the onboard headers for my boot drive, as the chance for compatability issues to arise is much much lower.
  • profdlpprofdlp The Holy City Of Westlake, Ohio
    edited August 2003
    a2jfreak said
    I'd definitely use the onboard headers for my boot drive, as the chance for compatability issues to arise is much much lower.

    I don't think you can run cdrom drives off the Promise controller. (Can you?:confused: ).

    My plan is to have the DVD and CD burner drives on the onboard IDE channels, and run the two hard drives off the PCI Promise card (it has two channels). Four channels, four drives.
    Assuming I go ahead and try it that way, what are the chances of having it go whacko down the road? Or am I pretty much out of the woods if XPpro installs OK?


    Prof
  • a2jfreaka2jfreak Houston, TX Member
    edited August 2003
    I don't think the card will go whacko in the future, I just think there's a possibility compatability issues will not arise when first installing XP, so later on you might need to switch to the onboard headers.

    Here's a scenario:
    4 headers, 4 drives.
    "Oh, it would be nice to have some RAID 0 goodness, let me add a drive to the card's second header."
    Boom! Card starts exhibiting weird behavior.

    Hey, it probably will not happen, but I normally err on the side of caution.

    Anyway, use the card for the boot drive, it probably won't have any glitches w/ your system. If it does, move the boot drive to an onboard header.
    profdlp said
    My plan is to have the DVD and CD burner drives on the onboard IDE channels, and run the two hard drives off the PCI Promise card (it has two channels). Four channels, four drives.
    Assuming I go ahead and try it that way, what are the chances of having it go whacko down the road? Or am I pretty much out of the woods if XPpro installs OK?


    Prof
  • TheBaronTheBaron Austin, TX
    edited August 2003
    i'm using the card, i've noticed that my atto scores are lower than people NOT using the card but i've yet to verify that on my own. either way though, you probably need to use it while you do the XP install, so that it can read the entire drive (before you perform that XP patch that lets it do it off the mobo)
  • teflemingtefleming
    edited August 2003
    profdlp said


    I don't think you can run cdrom drives off the Promise controller. (Can you?:confused: ).

    [/B]

    I'm running a DVD-ROM off my TX2
  • profdlpprofdlp The Holy City Of Westlake, Ohio
    edited August 2003
    MoXon said
    I'm running a DVD-ROM off my TX2

    Can you boot from a CD when necessary? If so, I'll put the two HD's on the Pri & Sec onboard IDE, and the DVDrom and CDRW on the TX2.


    Prof

    (Learning new stuff is why I ask these questions - thanks to all for your suggestions! :thumbsup: )
  • teflemingtefleming
    edited August 2003
    I think so, I don't remember trying that per se. I'll give it a shot and let you know.
  • MancabusMancabus Charlottesville, VA
    edited August 2003
    To make things easier you should have at least one HD on the primary channel onboard. I have windows installed on an HD on a controller card, but the bootup files, ntldr, boot.ini and such went on the drive connected as primary slave. Not sure why though, maybe cus it's windows, but I think some boards might not like booting from what is considered in the BIOS to be SCSI controller even though it's IDE.

    I have two HD's on primary onboard, burner on secondary, one HD on controller primary, and DVD and ZIP on controller secondary. All work just fine, although on the fly copying of CD's doesn't always work correctly.

    Oh yeah at least one CD should be onboard for booting off cd, although sometimes booting from CD on a controller will work, I think it depends on the manufacturer.
  • teflemingtefleming
    edited August 2003
    It will boot from an optical drive attached to the controller, just verified it with my Über DVD.
  • profdlpprofdlp The Holy City Of Westlake, Ohio
    edited August 2003
    Here's the update:

    Sorry I couldn't post earlier, I just got back to my computer.

    Last night I setup the system like this:

    Ultra 100TX2 =
    Maxtor 30GB "L" series on IDE1
    WD 20GB "200B" on IDE2

    MB IDE =
    DVD rom as Primary Master
    CDRW as Secondary Master (Not yet installed - Coming Soon)

    The Asus A7A266 has an option in the boot order section for SCSI, which is how windows likes to view any HD controller. I had a little trouble with the install, but this was due to some memory timing tweaks I had done via the bios previously. Once I set things back to "By SPD" everything went fine. I have downloaded and installed all of the Windows Update stuff, Norton System Works 2002, imported all of her documents, etc, and installed a bunch of her medical programs (she's a doctor).

    I sincerely appreciate all of your advice - as I mentioned before, I've learned a lot - including some valuable answers to questions I didn't even think to ask! I heartily agree with those of you who suggested that I play it safe, even though I didn't exactly follow that advice! In this case I had a risk-free chance to try things out, since I was using two new drives and was able to leave her original drive untouched (I backed up her data over our network).

    These are by no means "high performance" drives, but I am happy with the ATTO scores.

    Thanks to all the great S-M folks! :thumbsup::respect::respect:


    Prof:wave:
  • profdlpprofdlp The Holy City Of Westlake, Ohio
    edited August 2003
    Here's the second drive on the Promise Ultra 100TX2:


    Prof
  • leishi85leishi85 Grand Rapids, MI Icrontian
    edited August 2003
    i too have the promise ultra ata 100 tx2 ide controller, i got it for free also, those atto scores looks on par with my scores, i think, last time i did atto was like last year, haha
  • profdlpprofdlp The Holy City Of Westlake, Ohio
    edited August 2003
    leishi85 said
    i too have the promise ultra ata 100 tx2 ide controller, i got it for free also, those atto scores looks on par with my scores, i think, last time i did atto was like last year, haha

    Thanks for the ATTO info. Whenever I post an ATTO score I sit back and wait for someone to tell me how lousy my drives are performing - it's good to know that I'm in the ballpark.

    By the way, shouldn't you be sitting out by your mailbox waiting for your new gear? :tongue:


    Prof
  • leishi85leishi85 Grand Rapids, MI Icrontian
    edited August 2003
    nah, it's late already, i don't think USPS or whomever is deliverying the goods work this late, or at least deliver this late.
  • TexTex Dallas/Ft. Worth
    edited August 2003
    profdlp said
    leishi85 said
    i too have the promise ultra ata 100 tx2 ide controller, i got it for free also, those atto scores looks on par with my scores, i think, last time i did atto was like last year, haha

    Thanks for the ATTO info. Whenever I post an ATTO score I sit back and wait for someone to tell me how lousy my drives are performing - it's good to know that I'm in the ballpark.

    By the way, shouldn't you be sitting out by your mailbox waiting for your new gear? :tongue:


    Prof

    If you bump the pci latency the writes will get very close to the reads. I have used a number of promise controllers and try and always have a couple old ata66 ot even ata33 controllers around just for cdroms and dvd's etc. I like having every device as a master on its own channel. For a long time they were much faster and stabel then VIA'a onboard devices actually. Now tehy are about equal if you tweak them out. My cd-burners have always loved being hung off those babys btw.

    Tex
  • profdlpprofdlp The Holy City Of Westlake, Ohio
    edited August 2003
    What would you recommend as a way to tweak the PCI Latency. This is an Asus A7A266 with an ALi chipset.

    Is there a tweak for ALi, for the Promise Ultra 100TX2, or is it a bios setting? It has the latest bios (1012).


    Prof
  • TexTex Dallas/Ft. Worth
    edited August 2003
    You use powerstrip to tweak the latency of just the Promise controller. Its probably at 32 now. Try 64 or even 128 if its a disk controller. With raid controllers I have seen gains all the way to 240+. Writes take much longer to complete then reads so you are trying to give the disk controller more time on the bus. Almost every time you see the writes way way behiond the reads its a latency related prob.

    Tex
  • profdlpprofdlp The Holy City Of Westlake, Ohio
    edited August 2003
    I'll give that a try.

    Thanks, Tex! :thumbsup::respect:


    Prof
  • TexTex Dallas/Ft. Worth
    edited August 2003
    If you get stuck I actually wrote a short guide thing on how to use it to set latency

    Tex
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