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Editor's note: For those of you who missed it on the news page here and on other sites, it has been discovered recently that the Promise Ultra66 card is almost identical to the Promise FastTrack66. Indeed, there are a few simple ways you can convert one to the other, if you're handy with a soldering iron. I believe this is the original article (translated from German) from the person who discovered the hack. Why would you want to do this? Well, the Ultra66 is a fairly generic UDMA/66 card, whilst the FastTrack66 is a UDMA/66 RAID card, which allows hardware striping, mirroring and other sexy features. Keep in mind a few things, though - firstly, heat or dodgy soldering can kill your card and plugging a shorted card into your motherboard may cause all kinds of problems. Secondly, this is NOT endorsed by Promise and you can guarantee you are throwing your warranty out the window. Finally, the FastTrack is not a dedicated RAID card as seen in server boxes etc - it uses BIOS instructions, which have to be executed on the system's main CPU (as opposed to a dedicated SCSI card, which would have it's own CPU such as an i960 or similar on-board). However, as Poly shows below, the performance increase is an absolute bargain for those willing to attempt this simple hack. Thanks for the info, Poly! -Agg

I saw the Ultra66 to Fasttrack hack first up in the forums here at overclockers.com.au. I was chuckling as a few blokes flamed this poor bastards ass, only to graciously eat humble pie a short while later when someone bothered to go take a look for it. I spotted a good link for the conversion process here... http://www.geocities.com/promise_raid/english.htm.

Follow the instructions in that link, they should work close enough to get you home. It worked like that for me except for the reboot after the bios flash... I didnt get an error message, it just flicked past the bios real quick. I shrugged and carried on to the next step :o ]. Here's the result of my first attempt at component soldering..

Good enough to make it work. I used a 100ohm 1/4w resistor. Pin 23 to ground. Mine is just crimped down under the backplate, on the ground pads near the hole.

Next, I ghosted off my existing (stable) partitions to another spindle, power off, plugged everything in and booted with a 98 boot disk.

Jump into the sys bios and set scsi as bootable on the p3v4x. Reboot again, into the fasttrack bios and create the array. Reboot, fdisk, reboot, format, reboot, ghost, reboot lol. Watch 98 come up unchanged, just a bunch quicker. Have a poke and prod around at the array, all seems fine.

The chuckle of two Quantum KA plus 7200 6.4gb drives, that are reading and moving in tandem (just a tiny delay) is very satisfying. In this Raid 0 (stripe) set, I get the the full capacity of 12.xxgb.

OK, so now its time to find room for these two new drives... hmmm, still have that extra power supply from when I was screwing with that c300a at well below freezing :p. Hey, I always wanted a shot of that posted somewhere....

Thanks Agg : ]

So out comes the old PS and in goes the drive rack. The macase has lots of room for drives, and this mod wouldnt have been needed if I had a couple of drive mounting kits.. :o / ahh well.