Promise ATA 66 PCI Cards now $ 11.50 w/ $6 SH at Compgeeks

[DealyDo]

Crap posted to wrong board so here goes again-

I plan on expanding my Asus P3V4X to add two more EIDE Channels to my system. It looks like this card will let each channel run independently at it's highest speed so I guess you could run a CD-RW on one channel nd a CD-ROM on the other and do a CD to CD burn. With my new 12x Plextor burn-proof CD-RW this could be love waiting to be.

As already discussed here, You can also get it new at Onvia for $20.58 with manuals and a ATA 66 cable. I just felt that the used one from Compgeeks would be more likely be upgradable/hackable to raid.

Compgeeks Promise ATA Card 66 for $ 11.00

Six month warranty is good enough for me I can just about torture it to death in that period of time. And if I hack it it doesn't matter.

 

[Siberian dude]

Ground spipping is $5, just pull down the Shipping option--it's on top.

 

[MontyBurns]

Why do you think a used card is somehow more hackable???

This doesn't seem like a good deal. Once you buyt he cable and pay shipping, it's the same price as Onvia with the cable and shipping included. And the onvia one is new.

 

[GetInMyFatBelly]

Might be a better deal if your looking to buy a hard drive at the same time is to buy a Maxtor 40GB or larger drive (I bought a 60GB to upgrade TiVo, which was easy) and buy the ATA100 card for $49.95 and get the $50 rebate on it. I also upgraded that Maxtor ATA100 card (it's a ATA100 Promise card) to raid ATA100 and that was almost as easy as the TiVo upgrade, both seem to be working fine so far. I love doing this Sh*t, build a emulator system for DireTV, buy a Apex 600a DVD player with loophole, Get 3 $100 rebates at CC on the TiVo (making it basically free), this forum for some great deals, DVDTalk for some cheap DVD's, Even got a deal from Ubid (if you can believe that) a surround sound car audio system for $199 (the Sherwood DTS system, I paid $350 just for the decoder a year ago) there having another one if your interested, you gotta love the internet, what's next; bring it on, I'm broke but having fun...
Oh, and I almost forgot the new and last Smashing Pumpkins album (25 songs) for free at www.billy-corgan.com

 

[DealyDo]

Monty-

I don't know for sure. There was some posts that Promise's newer munufactured cards might be altered to be less hackable, I don't know. Also I have 4 ATA 66 cables so this is not important to me. Now the ATA 100 card may have been the go. But then I'd have to buy a ATA100 drive to hook to it. I know that I wouldn't be able to resist.

 

[VisionsUCI]

Getinmyfatbelly... sounds more like a brag to me... but back to the original question. i think that i would go with a new card, rather than buy a used one, and for hardly any less.

 

[GetInMyFatBelly]

Sorry, looks like it may have had some bragging in the extremely informative post, sorry am I still bragging...

 

[jhassi]

yeah i just upgraded to RAID with a cheap Promise ATA/66 card and it kicks butt, with two crappy 20gig 5400 drives i'm getting 21,000 in Sandra 2000.7.6.49. 21,000 is about 25% faster than what reviews say those super good 7200rpm 2meg buffer DiamondMax Plus drives are getting (man wish i had two of those!). All versions of HD Tach locked so i couldn't test.

I used Step 2b (over the chip, not underneath) from the "Make your own RAID controller" site. Be sure to follow the instructions to the letter and it'll work, at least it does with a new Rev A board. I used a 15-20 watt (one of those, i forget) soldering iron and it worked great but took forever to heat up.

whatever you do, do not follow Tom's instructions, it does not work and have no clue how tom got it to work, I tried it three times that way and it never worked by the method he showed.

 

[DealyDo]

Well I listened to Belly-Cancelled Compgeeks and bought the Promise ATA 100 from Buy.com $31.00-10.00 new customer + 5.65 shipping (I know free shipping but for $ 50+) anyway 27.00 delivered. Now I have an upgrade path and maybe ATA 100 raid next year.

 

[GetInMyFatBelly]

DD was that the Maxtor ATA100 card, if not then you won't get the $50 rebate from Maxtor.

Oh, and just read on the forum section of the site that Maxtor's don't work well with the raid set-up.
http://www.tweakhardware.com/guide/raid100/

 

[DealyDo]

No I passed on the Maxtor deal. I have two relatively new ATA66 WD 20 gigs that run nicely. I'll pick up a nice IBM Drive next spring maybe even convert this card to do RAID like Belly. I'm more concerned to get a seperate channel for my new 12/10/32 Plextor Burn-Proof CD-RW and use the other channel as my primary drive channel. Should be sweet since both channels run independently, reduces CPU usage, will be able to burn CD-CD with one of those $82.00 Toshiba 1402 DVD drives.

 

[jhassi]

um, you guys are aware that to do RAID you have to start with two blank drives right??


It just sounded to me ("maybe i'll do raid next year . .&quot like some of you think you can just make the card RAID and suddenly you'll have RAID. Doesn't work that way, if you have two drives full of data you'll have to put that data somewhere (or lose it all), format both, and then do the RAID.

oh yeah, and think of the pain of upgrading!! To upgrade RAID drives I'd have to get another temp hard drive large enough to hold the contents of the RAID drives, then format the RAID drives, then put two new drives in for RAID, then dump the contents from the temp hard drive onto the new RAID drives. So to upgrade my two 20 gig RAID drives, I'd have to get three drives, one 40gig to hold the contents of the drives, plus two new drives to RAID. Or you can tape backup everything, which is what I did but took hours.

So you see, RAID isn't always the way to go, be sure to get enough storage space to last a good long time and that the drives are plenty fast, obviously you don't want to be going through all those headaches every year.

too bad i didn't follow my own advice

 

[MontyBurns]

I have to tell ya, a 12X Plextor with Burn Proof doesn't need its own master channel on a controller card. You could run that thing through the floppy connection and I really doubt you'd make a coaster.

If you're not getting 12X now, or you've got some burning problems, I assure you the problem is NOT in your controller card. It's somewhere else in your computer.

 

[DealyDo]

It does when you want to do CD-CD on the fly copying and you have a nice rounded cable that you paid $ 31.95 for butthe two Friggin IDE coonectors are about two inches apart. It makes me run both my hard drives on the same IDE channel and they have to stack in my Supermicro 750A case just to use the cable. This means that my reader and writer have to share a channel, not good with IDE and on-the fly copying.

I'm also intrigued by the CPU ultilzation thing that I read on the Promise site. And I now have ATA capability, luking for an IBM Drive now, and I can RAID Baby if I want to with a little hack.

 

[DealyDo]

Hey Jhassi-

NOT-Try Norton Ghost. I have a complete backup on a bootable CD, four CD's total-high compression. If my drive craps out and I've had a few do so or load some crap that screw the stability-I can reinstall from the image file-10 minites start to finish. Now with a 12x drive I do a complete backup in about 15 miutes. Auomatically spans the CD's for me.

 

[DieselMan]

DealyDo, which version of Ghost did you use to make your backup CD's? I didn't know you could save images on CD from ghost (unless you do it from another software after you have the image created). And how did you get your CD's to "span" (as in inserting one CD after the other)? Thanks

 

[ElectricLegs]

From what I'm reading I think some of you might be thinking of connecting a CD to a RAID card...Won't work, RAID will only recognise hard drives. Either way leave the CDs connected to the onboard controller even if you only have a Promise U66/no raid. It won't do anything but slow the hard drives attached to the U66. For you folks thinking about RAID striping..format with the "FORMAT C: /Z:32" command(32kb sectors)and use 16kb sectors (16kb x 2 stripes = 32kb)in the raid setup for desktop workstation performance. BTW the promise card I got from Compgeeks was NEW/OEM not a used one.

 

[4824guy]

<< which version of Ghost did you use to make your backup CD's? I didn't know you could save images on CD from ghost (unless you do it from another software after you have the image created). And how did you get your CD's to &quot;span&quot; (as in inserting one CD after the other)? Thanks >>




Both Ghost and Powerquest's Drive Image can be used for HD back and images and be burnt as backup's. You must first create and tell the software image to be created into 650meg files. Then you can burn them on cdr or cdrw disks. You can restore from these spaned images afterwards

 

[DieselMan]

4824guy, thanks; I am not sure how you do this in ghost (specifying the image to be broken up into 650 Megs chunks). I am using Ghost 6.0. Thanks.

 

[DealyDo]

I had 6.0. Now I have Ghost 2001. It has a an option selection in the pull down memu. You select where you want to save image to. For CD you can select that you want to span multiple disk and if you put startup dick in the A drive before you start, it will make a bootable CD for you. You can select high compression to reduce the size. As always there are a few considerations with using compression.

 

[DieselMan]

Thanks for clarifying. This is great!

 

[Sparty]

DealyDo
I had 6.0. Now I have Ghost 2001. It has a an option selection in the pull down memu. You select where you want to save image to. For CD you can select that you want to span multiple disk and if you put startup dick in the A drive before you start, it will make a bootable CD for you. You can select high compression to reduce the size. As always there are a few considerations with using compression.

HEY, mine won't fit in there

 

[jhassi]

DealyDo



<< NOT-Try Norton Ghost >>



ok you guys, i'm running RAID, do you think i was freaking born yesterday?? I do use Ghost, been using probably longer than you have (years), but it's not perfect.

First of all maybe i'll do 2:1 compression, so i could put 1.3 gig on a single 650meg CD. oh great, now all I need to do is burn 17 CDs to put a 20 gig hard drive on them. GREAT, like i don't have something better to do with my time. And why do you think i was using tapes?? Duh, they hold 4/8 gigs at 1meg/second backup.

Also, Ghost keeps claiming it'll record to CDs, but I've yet to figure out how to do it, i'm running 6.0 Standard/Enterprise edition.

i'm just soooooooo tired of newbies getting on forums and trying to tell the old dogs how to do things like we're stupid or something, jeeeeezzzzzzzzzz

 

[jhassi]

alright so 2001 records to CDs, i'll let you know when i have the hours and hours to waste recording to 17 CDs, even with a 12x CD-R drive that'd take an hour, and that's just the recording, not including the time to compress the data.

that's why i have two tr4 tape drives, so i can let them backup the important files overnight and i ghost the windows partition once a week, well not anymore, ME's more stable than 98 so less full system restores, once a month is plenty.

yippy!! Senior status! do i get a cookie?

 

[wesman2]

As for upgrading raid drives.

Try:
1. hook up both the new large drives and ghost the contents of your raid drive on to the large drives dividing it into two image files, one for each drive.
2. reformat the smaller drives into seperate drives.
3. copy the two image files onto to smaller drives from large drives.
4. format your new raid using the large drives.
5. Ghost the image files onto the new raid.
6. give your two 20 gig drives to me.