Date: Fri, 22 Jan 1999 08:33:04 +0100 (CET) From: Søren Schmidt <sos@freebsd.dk> To: dawes@rf900.physics.usyd.edu.au (David Dawes) Cc: current@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Promise FastTrack PCI IDE controller Message-ID: <199901220733.IAA18616@freebsd.dk> In-Reply-To: <19990122120633.A13400@rf900.physics.usyd.edu.au> from David Dawes at "Jan 22, 1999 12: 6:33 pm"
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It seems David Dawes wrote: > > >> >I also run the card without its BIOS, as that tends to get in the way. > >> >I think the FastTrack is just an Ultra/33 with another BIOS chip on it. > >> > >> I'll try pulling the BIOS tomorrow. We didn't get this card for it's > >> RAID features anyway. > > > >That helped me in a lot if situations, but performance wont be as good > >as we seem not to initialize the chip(s)... > > When I remove the BIOS it works OK. The initialisation is different > though. Yep I know, the chipset on the Promise is not initialized to what the drives support then, its working in a slow (but always working though) mode. I did plan to change this, and even got the docs for the chips but it has sunken pretty low on the TODO list lately... > The performance isn't as good, as you say. For one of these disks on > the PIIX4 I get about 12 MByte/s for a large (1GB) sequential read from > the raw device. I only get about 4 MByte/s for one of the same disks > on the Promise controller. I presume that's because it isn't initialised > to the fastest DMA mode? > > The performance is adequate for our needs though, so removing the BIOS > is a workable solution. Or you could try to get ahold of a BIOS from an Ultra/33 controller, that does work in most situations... - Søren To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message
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