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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

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