Stuff like this is why I won't be using RAID anytime soon. I like to know where my data is at all times, and RAID (for all it's benefits) just adds another layer of mystery as what's happening with my data.

Stuff like that almost makes me wish for the audio feedback of the old Atari 8-Bit drives. You actually hear the data being read and written, sometimes you could discern copy-protection sounds, and you knew when you heard a "rasberry" sound and your program/game didn't pop up immediately after... that meant you were in serious trouble.

Ok, I guess that's enough ponderous reflection for now...

Wow, that was so... not at all helpful.

RAID is good... when it works. This RAID-5 array is excellent because it's speedy and redundant. Too bad I can't get my data on it. That would make it much better. 😁

Snover

The footprint for the RAID card is huge -- there is only one PCI slot I can fit it in because otherwise it hits the hard drives.

Yep, common problem with RAID cards in desktop PC's. I got pissed off so decided to wait for a SATA RAID card.

So, I finally plug the four huuuge round ATA/133 cables into the drives and somehow manage to get them also connected to the controller.

Isn't this a ATA/100 card? A cable is a cable is a cable but just wanted to ask since I thought promise only had ATA/100 RAID cards.

I turn on the box, and it only loads the RAID controller on my motherboard.

Happened to me too. I had to disable the HPT controller on the mobo so that the Promise would initalize.

For whatever reason, I thought that the Promise Array Management software might fix the problem, so I installed that.

Nah, that's just a program to view your RAID array and monitor it. Doesn't really do much. Only good thing it did for me was to turn off the annoying beeping sound the card makes.

My latest thought is to take the two drives connected to the old RAID controller, plug them in as slaves on two of the IDE channels on my new controller, set them up in a RAID-0 array as they are on the motherboard RAID controller, and see if they'll boot that way so that I can copy stuff onto the new drives that way. Will this work? Is RAID information stored on the drives so that it can be moved to a different card?

No it won't work. Yes RAID info is stored on the HD's and different RAID controllers access it differently. Which is why if your RAID controller goes kaput you'll need the exact same RAID controller to access your data.

And what about my SYSTEM registry? I mean, what the hell happened? And why won't it fix?

Dunno. Sounds like some kind of system instability.

I have a Windows emergency restore diskette, and STILL that didn't fix it.

OMG. That didn't fix it! Suprise, Suprise. 😁

Oh, and of course, I'm still kicking myself for not backing up my system before I tried installing the new shit. I was just too excited and my young self didn't think to do it.

Yup, definetly have a second system to do this crap on. I finally decided I needed a server to setup this on so I wouldn't touch it and let it do it's thang. Otherwise being the tweak fanatic that I am I'd mess it up. A server computer should not be touched.

Nicht

Stuff like this is why I won't be using RAID anytime soon. I like to know where my data is at all times, and RAID (for all it's benefits) just adds another layer of mystery as what's happening with my data.

RAID isn't that mysterious. Go research a bit and that's all that it does. What you NEED to make sure of is that the drives are reliable. The controller is reliable and that the system is stable before sticking your data on it. You also NEED to have a proper backup plan of that data, Filesystem's and/or data can always go disappearing which is what a good backup is for.

For now I'm using External USB 2.0/1394 drives for my Data. Ordered 2 200GB drives last week and one of those 200gb will be a backup drive for the first. It's ugly but it works and it will last me until I can get a SATA RAID setup.

The card is ATA/133 read, ATA/100 write. Don't ask me how that works.
Are you sure about needing the same controller? I would think that controllers by the same manufacturer would use the same lookup stuff.
Maxtor is shipping SATA drives now, and I think there are SATA RAID controllers, though they'll cost you.

Originally posted by Snover Wow, that was so... not at all helpful.

I never said I was helping, just pondering. It's what happens when I post half-asleep.

Originally posted by DosFreak RAID isn't that mysterious. Go research a bit...

I get the basic idea, it's just that right now, there are no obvious advantages for me.

Your description of the various "issues" doesn't help. From your description, if I had an onboard RAID and it went "poof" I would need a duplicate motherboard to access my data (a PCI card might use the same chip but I wouldn't be confident in that as a solution).

It's another layer of separation between me and my data and I need a pretty good reason to accept it. Until it becomes as "universal" as IDE, I'll probably pass.

Nope, actually, I hooked up my two RAID-0 drives to my RAID-5 controller as two slaves and the thing recognized and configured the array without a hitch. I'm now running DriveCopy 4 to do a direct copy of the drive. Unfortunately, it's only going at ~60MB/*minute*. Trust me when I say this isn't regular performance. (My RAID-0 benchmarked at 45MB/s, IIRC.) Hopefully in nine hours it'll all be done with. I know I'll be glad when it is, especially since the two drives are hanging precariously out of the box on their sides.

Originally posted by Snover Nope, actually, I hooked up my two RAID-0 drives to my RAID-5 controller as two slaves and the thing recognized and configured the array without a hitch.

Well that's good to hear anyway...

I'm pretty sure that RAID is a standard.

Well, so is SCSI. But that didn't stop bewildering variations of it from springing up all over the place.

Snover wrote:

I'm pretty sure that RAID is a standard.

RAID is a standard but so is MBR...and you don't see All OS's have boot options for All other OS's in their boot loaders do ya?

You were lucky this time. If ya get bored compare the Promise chip on the mobo to the one on the PCI card and email Promise. Could make for a good bit of info for anyone else.

Whaa? What are you recommending I do?

The two chips are very different. One of them has an XOR engine (RAID-5 capability), the other is built-in to my MSI K7T266 Pro2-RU motherboard (FastTrak100), capable of doing RAID-0, RAID-1, or (I believe) RAID-0+1. (Of course, the SX4000 can do all of this as well.) Certainly, Promise has all their specs up on their site.
I'm thinking this has more to do with the limitations of my BIOS or the x86 specs more than it has to do with anything Promise has done.
I wonder if anyone has done a compare to see if different manufacturers' RAID can be read by other manufacturers' cards. For now, at least, it seems that all Promise cards can read all Promise arrays (excepting, of course, going backward, trying to read a RAID-5 array on something only capable of 0,1,0+1. 😀

Glarrgh! Only 75% copied after 9 hours! 70MB/m! What could possibly be causing such a slowdown? That's less 1.16MB/s! Slow! Slow! Slow!! The new drives are ATA/133, the old drives are ATA/100, the cables are rated for ATA/133, as is the RAID controller, so what the hell?
I should've uninstalled some games (like Omikron, which I did a full install of -- 2.5GB) ... oh, well.

The reason why it is/was slow is that the drives were configured as slaves.

The fastest config would be a system with all of its drives as masters with no slaves hanging off them.

If the system does not have a connection for another master, the fastest slave drive should be configured as a slave to the fastest master drive.

All slave drives should have a master drive.

In plain English, slave drives slow master drives down. The slower the slave drive, the more it slows down the master.

Thanks for the warning on RAID. I was considering buying the K7T266 yesterday (I didn't know that RAID had started to come standard on consumer motherboards). But I might leave that stuff for a bit longer.

I know that having slaves makes it slower, but 70MB/minute?! no. The IBMs are ATA/100 and the Maxtors ATA/133. You can disable onboard RAID. And, of course, all these drives are configured as masters. The speeds certainly aren't what I got from my RAID-0, but they're sufficient.

Drive #2 of 4 failed today. Sent in an RMA to Googlegear. Hopefully this won't be a trend.

ARRRGH!@#$!#@$
Received new drive, plugged it in, it still gave me 'Critical' message. Looked in the management utility and it said that drive 2 was "Free". Then I read the manual which said it would automatically rebuild the dead drive. So, I tried getting the computer to load, but of course it dismounted improperly when the drive died so I got an INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE blue-screen. So I restarted and ran the Win2K repair console (at the reboot I checked and saw all four disks in the RAID array though there was still the "Critical" message) and did the whole CHKDSK dance and it completed. I restarted and was ready for everything to be happy but then I saw "Array 1: Off Line". Dammit. So I go into the array management utility and now drive 1 is listed as "Free". WHAT THE HELL? I sent a message to Promise. Let's hope they aren't forwarding mail from support@promise.com to /dev/null. This is some pretty serious shit -- over 200GB of data.

My sympathies. I attempted to install a new program in XP today... it appeared to freeze, then spontaneously rebooted.

My IDE drive light was locked on and the BIOS was reporting that I had no hard drives. Fully removed power. Came back later and it seemed fine (both drives back in the BIOS).

Then I notice XP keeps telling me it can't run various items from the menu because they're missing. It's then that I notice that XP is reporting a single, unformatted 31Gig partition for my second drive (it's actually a five partition 120Gig drive).

Booting back to 98SE all seems fine, the two FAT32 partitions on the second drive are there and the files are accessible. Ran Norton Disk Doctor on the two partitions, and the second one fails, claiming invalid partition data. Meanwhile "Partition Magic" sees and scans all partitions on the second drive and reports they are all fine.

Not sure what to do now. I trust NDD with general disk operations, but not partition data (it's been wrong before). Yet PM is reporting the partitions as fine and visible, even though XP can't see them... Hrmmm...

Cut the red wire...or the blue wire? *tick* *tick* *tick*

My thought is that if I delete and re-create the array that things will fix themselves, but I don't really know. Maybe, just maybe, if I can get the failed drive working one more time I can rebuild #1 and then from there rebuild the new #2. However, I think the problem with #2 was the solid-state and not the drive platters/heads/motor/etc. Not to mention the fact that the old #2 is now out-of-sync with the FAT since I did a CHKDSK. ARRGH!