[ILUG] Promise 20376

[Bryan O'Donoghue]

Barry Flanagan wrote:
> On Wed, 2004-05-19 at 15:41, Stephane Dudzinski wrote:
> 
>>Hello,
>>
>>Got an Asus a7v8x @home which hosts a Serial ATA raid controller
>>(Promise 20376). It detected both drives ok (sticked 2x160GB) and
>>created a RAID 1 array using the controller. I was expecting to see only
>>one drive on Linux, but it sees the two of them (declared as sda and
>>sdb). 
>>
> 
> 
> Yuk. If it is the same as the 20267....


I hate to say horrible things about Promise...
Well that's not technically true.

There was a Promise array once, and members of the ILUG told me to run away.
Unfortunately the box was bought by then and not controlling the budget I got 
no say.

The heel of the hunt was, Promise sucks. After flashing the array's firmware to 
try to get it to behave and *not* nuke it's RAID container when just one drive 
failed, and deploying the thing as a primary RAID array, fortunately with a 
Dell Powervault as a backup[1] long story, the Promise box died ignominously, 
and lost an organisation an *entire* day's worth of data.

[1] Powervault lost a drive and then couldn't/wouldn't rebuild drive parity 
when drive got replaced.  Dell RAID-5 array (no hot swap) gets itself all upset 
and totally useless during installation of Promise RAID box, so, no data loss.

It's worth noting that the Dell box, still functioned with a drive lost, while 
the Promise box just gave up[2]

[2] Rehab : Is for quitters.

Moral of the story. I'd sooner rely on a daisy chain of USB pen drives to hold 
my data, then I would a Promise RAID controller *especially* and IDE RAID 
setup, which just sounds dodgy when you say it out loud.


-- 
Bryan O'Donoghue
Embedded Software Engineer

Europlex Technologies Ltd
Clonshaugh Business & Technology Park
Dublin 17
Ireland

T:+353 (0) 1 2500500
F:+353 (0) 1 2500590
E:bryano at euoplex.ie
W:www.europlex.ie