Replacement for Promise TX2000 suggestions please!

[Fulkren]

Greetings everyone.

My apologies if this has been covered in a previous post. The search engine didn't find anything, but I get the feeling that the search function isn't working correctly (is it?).

I have a Promise FastTRAK TX2000 RAID controller that is giving me no end of trouble and I'm getting sick of it. It keeps losing one of the drives on my RAID1 arrays every couple of days or so. I had read that this could happen with promise controllers and WD drives, but it loses my Seagate Barracudas as well. This last time it not only lost the drive, it fragged the MFT on it.

Does anyone have some suggestions on who makes a better RAID controller than promise? Or is promise still as good as it gets even with the problems? I know that Adaptec used to be pretty good, but I've heard that they have taken a real plunge in the quality department as of late.

If you have suggestions for a very reliable controller, then please let me know, as I don't want to replace the current controller with another Promise board unless they still are about the best one can get. Are there better Promise RAID controllers than the TX2000 to consider? I'd like suggestions on both P-ATA and S-ATA controllers, if you would please. Currently this is for P-ATA though. My system specs are listed below if you need to know anything about them.

Thanks for the suggestions!

Justin

Intel P4 2.53ghz Proc
Asus P4B533-E Mobo
1024mb (2x512) Crucial DDR333 memory
ATI AIW Raedon 8500DV video
Creative Soundblaster Audigy 2 audio
1x WD 60gb BB series system drive, 1x Seagate Barracuda 160gb storage HDD
Promise Technologies FastTRAK TX2000 RAID controller
--2x Seagate Barracuda 200gb 8mb buffer HDD RAID 1 mirrored
--2x WD 180gb JB series HDD Raid 1 mirrored
Pioneer DVR-104 DVD-R drive
Plextor Premium CDRW
DAT Optic 1394B firewire2 pci
Adaptec 2908 SCSI 1 controller (for HP ScanJet 4C scanner)
Lian-Li PC60 Mid Tower case (Need to upgrade to a full tower for all this stuff though )

 

[dreammmatt]

LOL! my friend and I have a problem similar to that, his just did that yesterday in fact - we both had our respective tx2000 cards 'lose' one of the drives we had in RAID-0 - - - being in RAID-0, as opposed to RAID-1, we thought we lost everything; but then I just realized that deleting and rebuilding the array would bring reallocate the drive to the array, and as long as you dont delete the table info when u delete the array, u should be fine - - - but yea, this is a really annoying 'issue' and I dunno who makes a better controller, I thought Promise was the best; tho I have heard good things about HighPoint too, and indeed, my old ATA-RAID HPT310 or whatever it was, never gave me a single issue in the years and years i've been usin it now

 

[shadowdr]

I like this card.It is a true hardware raid for a reasonable price.I have had 0 problems with it.It is consistent with benchmarks and does not suffer the slowdowns that can affect other software cards after long periods of use.Ghosting an OS image takes only three minutes to an IDE drive because of it's DOS drivers and on-board processor.I have a 60 and an 80 gig Maxtor dx9's on it now and it atto's to 103-105 read and writes.It has a top stripe size of 64 in raid0 but 32 seems to be faster.Newegg also carries the SATA version for 5.00 more
I also have this card as well.It used to be available at newegg but is no longer and carries a five year warranty.I paid like 25.00 for it and the raid0 speed is slightly faster and slightly slower than the previous depending on the status of defrag.It is based on the Silicon Image 0680/3112 chip set.The driver disk blows as it has all of koutech driver on it with no reference to which it uses but once setup it works great.There is also a SATA version of it too.
I must say that I am very happy with both of them and have had no issues at all.I have read enough about Promise driver issues to stay away from them all together.I also had Highpoint onboard 372 for a couple of years with no problems but with my latest mobo there were no onboard options available at the time so PCI was my only alternative.

 

[shadowdr]

I forgot you might want to see these.

 

[Fulkren]

Hi, guys

Thanks for the suggestions! That's two votes for Highpoint's controllers, and two against Promise already. I've never heard of Koutech before, but I'll definitely check them out. I didn't know that Acard made RAID controllers, but I use an Acard board in my CD Duplicator at work and it has performed perfectly for over a year now, so they sound like a good option as well.

I appreciate the input, and anyone else feel free to chip in with an opinion if you have them.

Justin