Promise ultra 66 and IDE RAID together

[Sciascia]

I already own a Promise Fast Track 66 and am expexcting ny IDE RAID contoller any day now. I called promise originally with the fast track and they said to put my CDrom on the secondary MB IDE controller and the boot drive on the FT by itself. With the IDE RAID controller, just for video capture, should I place the swap file on it too. or leave it on the FT? I have 256 MB ram, would it be better for me to disable virtual memory so that I can transfer staight to the HD? thus eliminating a transfer in there, or does it go straight to the destination? Do the two cards even work well together? TIA

[Fyx]

It's probably best that you leave your swap file on your boot drive. Since when you're dumping video onto your raid setup you will want it to have dedicated access to it. When you capture stuff it will go directly to your hard drive (it won't see your swap file) so your swap file being on your slower drive won't impair your capture performance at all.

Also regarding disabling the swap file, even if you have a massive amount of memory it's still reccomended that you leave it enabled. You can make it work a bit better by specifying a fixed size for it. (64-128 megs should be more than sufficient)

[DrMordrid]

The Fasttrak iteslf should only be used for editing and storage, not for the Windows installation.

As for running a Fasttrak66 and an Ultra66 together, this may not work. I called Promise about using an Ultra33 with my Fastrak and was told they could not coexist because their BIOS's used the same memory space. This may have changed with the FT66/U66 but I've not seen any info stating this.

Dr. Mordrid

[gibverse]

Got a FastTrack 66 and Ultra66 controller going in the same box at work... Of course there isn't any bootable material on the Ultra. I did find this howerver; with NT 4, make sure that whichever card you wish to boot from has the lower IRQ. If not, NT will flip out -- BIG TIME... Everything from "Incorrect Fucntion" error messages when trying to click on a drive in explorer to BSOD on boot up (INACCESSABLE_BOOT_DEVICE). Wierd thing, but it does seem to work for us. It's not in a video capture box, just a low-end departmental fileserver.

John