Mirroring Controllers - What have been Your Experiences?

Today's installment is a lengthy (but hopefully informative) piece on mirroring controllers. Ever had weird problems with a FastTrack TX2000? Are you curious how well HighPoints RocketRAID boards are really supported? Ever wondered which controller gives you the best performance for every dollar spent? In true Slashdot tradition, we're taking the issue and throwing it out to you, the readers. Futurepower(R) is willing to start us off with a wealth of information on his experiences, and I'm hoping a few of you are willing to do the same. Futurepower(R) asks: "What experiences, both good and bad, have you had with mirroring controllers? Are there manufacturers I haven't found?

For those who are interested but don't have experience, mirroring controllers (RAID 1) provide several advantages:

1. They prevent data loss when a hard drive fails. The other drive in the mirror takes over seamlessly.
2. Reading of data is considerably faster since the controller reads the data from the drive that has a head closest to the data.
3. You always have a full hard disk backup that you can pull from your system at any time, such as before installing new software.
4. You can clone a Windows XP drive using the RAID card, and you will have a bootable copy. This is valuable, since the Windows XP file system cannot copy all of its own files. (Don't flame this; it has been verified many times by Microsoft employees, who often suggest using the third-party tools.)

I've found four manufacturers that make inexpensive mirroring controllers:

1. Promise Technology's FastTrak TX2000 is available for about $85 delivered.
2. HighPoint's RocketRAID 133 costs about $80.
3. ACARD Technology's AEC-6880 costs about about $85. Froogle found only one vendor. That's scary.
4. Adaptec makes the ATA RAID 1200A, which is available for about $59 before delivery charges.

As you can see, these controllers cost from $59 to $85. Last weekend Fry's was selling a retail boxed 1800 MHz Athlon XP processor with fan included and an ECS motherboard for $59 total. So $80 seems like a lot for a little card with one chip and a flash ROM.

ECS (EliteGroup) has made 11 motherboards with on-board RAID mirroring controllers. One of them, the P4VXAD, has a Promise controller and costs about $52. What's that about? Employees at Fry's tell me that ECS has the poorest quality control of any of the motherboard manufacturers that they sell. To me, ECS motherboards seem to have surprisingly high quality. However, we have only tested three, and only one extensively.

Silicon Image makes, or made, their 0680 RAID chipset, and Koutech Systems sells the IOFLEX-Pir133 using that chipset. It costs $25 retail. I tried a Koutech card and had a lot of trouble with it, even after updating the BIOS. I talked to an application engineer at Silicon Image and a manager there. I was told that SI bought the technology from another company, and apparently it is no longer supported, doesn't work well, and the company does not intend to put more money into it. I found that the Koutech card corrupts files. The card gives a Stop 07B error when going into the Windows XP Recovery Console, unless the driver is loaded by hand, every time. I lost a lot of time with a product that apparently should not be sold.

My experience with mirroring controllers is mostly with those from Promise Technology. I've been using Promise mirroring controllers since they began making them.

The good about Promise:

1. Promise has been selling RAID 1 controllers a long time. They work.
2. Promise controllers can clone a hard drive quickly.
3. Now some motherboards have Promise mirroring chipsets. You can get the entire motherboard with the Promise controller on the board, for maybe $50 more than the Promise controller card alone.
4. Linux drivers are available. The web site says, "Windows XP/2000/NT4/Me/9x; Novell NetWare 4.1x/5.x; RedHat Linux 7.0/7.1/7.2; TurboLinux Server 6.5; TurboLinux Workstation 7; SuSE Linux 7.2; OpenLinux 3.1" Does that mean that later versions of Linux can't use this card, or did Promise forget to update the brochure PDF file?
5. Promise controllers work fine under DOS, but there is no error reporting if for some reason the mirror breaks.

The disadvantages with Promise, in my opinion:

1. Promise mirroring controllers have a software feature called "sychronization". I've asked many times over the years why it is necessary, since mirrored hard drives should be synchronized 100% of the time. I've never gotten an answer. Recently I've been told by Promise technical support people not to use synchronization, since it has caused problems. It sounds like some technical problem is being hidden.
2. Promise does not support their oldest mirroring controllers under Windows XP. This is a problem since there are many business computers that are used for data entry. A Pentium II is as fast as is necessary. Windows 98 is stable with only one program running. Now those computers need to be converted to Windows XP, since Microsoft has declared that its operating systems have a curious quality: They die. (According to Microsoft, it doesn't matter that at least 100,000,000 people are using Windows 98 worldwide, it came to the end of its life on "30-Jun-2003".)
   
   So, it is necessary to buy another controller for old data entry systems. Notice that Microsoft and Promise could decide to play this game again, and I would like to avoid the second round of buying and installing even another controller. I'd like to find a company that continues to support its products.
   
   The speed of computers used for data entry does not matter, but the security of the data does. Hard drive failures are becoming rare, but a hard drive failure can cause a lot of problems on a data entry computer, so mirroring is required.
3. Some Promise controllers, especially those on motherboards, take a long time to boot. Dots crawl across the screen even if no drives are connected to the controller. Is keeping the Promise name on the screen a time-wasting sales message from Promise? Recently Promise released a BIOS upgrade for some of its cards that reduced the dot-crawling time. However, there is apparently no upgrade for Promise controllers on motherboards.
4. About 2 months after I reported problems, Executive Software said they found a bug in their Diskeeper defragmentation software that might cause data corruption when used with Promise controllers. They said everyone using Diskeeper should upgrade to the new, free, minor version. I've seen no problems since then.
5. Promise Technology's sales literature can be disgusting. This is the second sentence in Promise's description of the FastTrak TX2000: "The FastTrak TX2000 ATA RAID card supports Ultra ATA/133 drives to rock workstations and boost small (or large) office servers like never before." To me, this is obviously written by someone who knows nothing about the product and doesn't care.
6. I find the abundant use of PDF files and unnecessary JavaScript on Promise Technology's web site annoying.

The Adaptec controller is cheaper, but it is Windows only. There are apparently no Linux drivers. This is a huge drawback, since these same old data entry computers may be still running when Windows dies again, and Windows XP is no longer supported, and there are Linux versions of the data entry programs, or they run under Wine.

The Acard controller supports SuSE, Red Hat, Caldera, and Turbo Linux, it says. But remember, Froogle found only one vendor.

HighPoint says they support Linux: "Linux Red Hat 7.3 & 8.0 (Software RAID Only)". This apparently means the card does not support Linux at all, since Linux has software RAID built in.

So, that's the extent of my knowledge and experience. Can you provide further insight?"

Comments

Re:I SUCCEED IT! TEH SECUNDUS IS TEH MINE!

[Anonymous Coward]

Heh, while waiting to post again, I had a crisis of confidence. I wondered if SUCCEED was spelt correctly. As I had Google in another window, I put SUCEED into it, and clicked for a search.

Naturally, it came back "Did you mean 'Succeed'", but the first link returned by Google, on a search for a misspelling of the word succeed is:

Well looky here

Now THATS ironic, Alanis.

3ware

[compwizrd]

Why no mention of the 3ware 7000-2?

Easily beats most if not all of these cards, especially since it is a hardware card, unlike some of those software cards mentioned.

Re:I run Linux on my 500 client network server

[Anonymous Coward]

How does running Linux make you immune to physical hard drive failures? The hard drive doesn't care whether it has a windows or linux filesystem on it when it dies.

Re:Linux HDD drivers are generally better than Win

[Anonymous Coward]

Holy crap, what an zealot. Could you even read your own post without laughing?

Really? My disks spin constantly unless I issue an hdparm call to tell them to sleep. Thats the default behaviour out of the box, at least for slackware 9. Though frankly it doesnt matter if they're spinning or idle.

I've seen harddrives fail in linux, windows, os/2, macs, xboxes, creative nomads. If it moves it can break. Windows doesnt add any more wear and tear.

If your harddrive is going to fail, the parent is correct, its a mechanical problem that doesnt care what OS you run. Linux does not make your disk last longer, and I defy anyone to prove otherwise.

If data integrity is important, pony up some $

[FreakyGeeky]

This is a topic that hits home for me. I have experience with Highpoint, Promise, and 3ware controllers. I used to use a Highpoint chip embedded on my motherboard. It performed fairly well, with the exception that it took two IRQs, and didn't allow my soundcard to function properly. I would get all manner of pops and clicks in the sound. It eventually drove me to the point that I bought a new motherboard and a Promise card. Ah, the Promise TX2 1000, how I hate thee. I will never buy a Promise card again. I spent more time rebuilding my system due to data corruption than I did using it to get work done. (Exaggeration) It caused unrecoverable drive corruption on three occasions in less than nine months. I switched again. Now I've got a 3ware 7506-4LP. I love it. It's a 64-bit 66MHz card, does RAID-5 and RAID-10, (in addition to RAID-0 and RAID-1) and it's fast. I've had it for a little over a month now without any trouble. Yes, it's more expensive than the cards listed, but I think it's money well spent.

Adaptec 1200A =~ highpoint

[sflory]

Adaptec's 1200A is Highpoint card with a slightly different bios on it. Heck I've heard you can flash it with highpoints firmware.

http://www.internetnews.com/storage/article.php/ 79 7261

Re:Not a first post post

[Photar]

I love it when you see a slashdot post where the first half is in italics because its a quote, but then they leave off the closing /i and the whole thing is in italics.

Gimme a break.

[delus10n0]

All of the cards listed are a joke. They are "semi-software" RAID cards. They are crap compared to the real deal, such as cards made by 3ware and the like. Cards with actual processors/cache/etc. on them, and not just some hook into a hard drive interrupt.

If you want to go cheap, you're much better off using Windows 2000/XP's dynamic drives/mirroring ability in software.

I never will understand why motherboard manufacturers use Promise/Highpoint chipsets on their "high-end" or "server" boards. Complete waste of time.

Re:3ware

[yem]

Its true. Promise and Adaptec offerings are extremely disappointing. Binary drivers. Limited distro support and poor performance.

The 3ware series OTOH are excellent. Good support - no download required. Web admin and monitoring available. ++

About to buy a 3ware 7506-8

[nick_urbanik]

I have used software RAID on Linux for years now, but recently I just cannot find a reliable IDE controller that works. I have tried the following:

• Promise FastTrack100 TX2 (PDC20270)
• Adaptek 1200A (HPT370A chipset),
• Iwill (HPT368 chipset)
• HighPoint Rocket 133 (HPT302 chip: didn't work at all) some months ago
• and PDC20276 built onto the Asus P4B533-E motherboard, as well as the
• various CMD64x, including the CMD649 and the
• Silicon Image 680

I returned to the Si680, but still keep getting:

Aug 29 04:39:31 nicksbox kernel: hde: dma_intr: status=0x51 { DriveReady SeekComplete Error }
Aug 29 04:39:31 nicksbox kernel: hde: dma_intr: error=0x84 { DriveStatusError BadCRC }

And worse, I get random lockups where the keyboard lights do not respond, Alt-Sysrq-s has no effect, and nothing in the log indicates anything at the point of lockup.

So I'm off to buy a 3ware to keep my 6 hard disks going.

It's going to be a nuisance to back everything up (203GB) and then restore, but a man's gotta do what a man's gotta do. Unless you have any other suggestions? All are most welcome.

Re:Attention j3110: You're Dumb.

[j3110]

I have a Zip 100 Disk that won't work without the cable because of the interference of all the other drive cables running in parrallel. BIOS will detect it as "Z@#$1@#$@" and it obviously doesn't work.

Also, I've had a Seagate that wasn't very tolerant of interference. It was getting CRC errors about 10+/s without a good shielded cable.

I don't know what tests you've seen, but the tester must have been an idiot. Run four IDE devices (at different speeds) in your box with the crappy standard ATA66 cables, in parralel, and then get out the smart utility from Linux and start transferring from all the devices. I bet you'll find more than CRC errors.

I have run into the problem myself, and I'm sure a many others have too, so you can bite me.

Just think of it theoretically as well. Why do you think there is a standard Cat5STP (shielded)? Why is RG6 shielded and required for satellite systems to work? Cables are lossy at high frequencies without proper shielding. You're probably one of those people that make ethernet cables by sorting the colors alphabeticaly (or by the colors of the rainbow, or make an acronym out of the names of the colors).

I have better things to do with my time than read the dictionary or play scrabble, consequently, I have very little respect or time for you Grammar Nazis that don't yet comprehend logic. While you're learning to spell some arbitrary word, I'm testing ATA-133 cables.

Now would be a good time for you to buy a book on making logic arguements and keeping irrelevant issues seperate.

If you don't want to take my advice on anything, then don't. Just don't come here posting non-sense without evidence.