Doing a antiquated hardware buildup. TX2000's query.

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  • Last Post 23 April 2016
james lawrence posted this 18 April 2016

I have 4 FastTrak TX2000 cards. Bios Ver. 2.00.0.28

I've got them in an old P4 2.6 ghz mobo.

Problem is this. No matter what I try I can't get past 10 ide devices. 

I can place 8 devices on two cards with the mobo supporting one hdd and one optical.

I can span 8 devices on 4 cards with the mobo doing the aforementioned task.

But nothing I try will allow a ninth device to be recognized on the fasttrak tx2000 array of 4.

Is there a hard limit for desktop mobo's? I have never gone past 7 hdd's and an optical before now.

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R P posted this 19 April 2016

Hi James,

Without more information about the hardware involved, my best guess is that you have run out of IRQs. Each IDE channel needs an interrupt. This is a limitation on some legacy devices.

While there is no way to add interrupts, it may be possible to free up IRQs being used by devices that you are not using. You might try disabling some or all of the following devices in the BIOS:

Serial Ports, Parallel ports and/or Floppy drives

You should get 1 additional IRQ from each device. Of course you don't want to disable anything you are using.

This is just a guess.

Also, if you are using Windows, then there is a later driver version available, v2.0.0.33.

james lawrence posted this 19 April 2016

Oh! 

Thank you for the response. Ok..... :)

I'm not an expert but do I only need one free irq per card worse case scenario?

And I believe the irq problem is cleared up as I can get 2 harddrives per card 4 cards simultaneously.

What I'm shooting for is 4 drives per card 4 cards simultaneously for 16 total. 

I did shutdown various ports and the floppies as per the owners manual for the raid cards to free up irq's.

Is there any other hard limits others than irq that would prevent me from running as many as 4 drives per card and as many cards as I have pci slots for?

 

Thanks again! 8~D 

I appreciate your time.

R P posted this 21 April 2016

Hi James,

You need 1 IRQ per channel and each TX2000 has 2 channels. So you need 8 IRQs or working IRQ sharing.

According to the manual the TX2000 supports PCI interrupt sharing, but for it to work everything has to support it. Also it might be a good idea to check the BIOS and enable APIC if it's not enabled. Make sure it's in APIC mode and not legacy mode. I don't know what your OS is but XP supports APIC, you need OS support.

If there are any other limitations, I don't know what they are, sorry.

But ultimatly, you are limited by the hardware. It may not be able to do what you want it to do.

Regards,

--Rich

james lawrence posted this 21 April 2016

Thanks again very much! :)

I did not know I needed two irq's per card. This was helpful ;)

By being even more frugal I have reached 14 drives on cards and I'm still experimenting to get this antique fileserver build to 16 + not including the onboard ide channels.

Might seem silly to everyone but I'm old and this is fun XD

james lawrence posted this 23 April 2016

/dev/sdr1 !!!

Still have a lot of partitioning and formatting to do but ......

 https://www.flickr.com/photos/spldart/25980202304

 

Thanks so much.

Gonna see if there is a limit. I've had 2 IT guys say 16 is it for a server mobo but that is now blown out of the water on a consumer p4 mobo.

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