August 25, 2006

Promise TX4300 RAID card is torturing me

A couple of months ago, a bunch of us in my team installed Promise TX4300 RAID cards and a pair of fast SATA drives in RAID 0 configuration to help speed up builds. And it has.

Except when the drivers freeze up my entire PC, forcing me to power-cycle the system. Then it does not really speed up my build. For bonus points, it will do this when I am trying to work from home with Remote Desktop, at which point I send out a plaintive email to the team asking if anyone is around who can please kick my PC.

When I go to the support page for the TX4300, it lists one BIOS version:

"FastTrak TX4300 BIOS V2.00.0.31"

and two driver versions, the latest of which notes:

"This driver is to be used with BIOS version v2.5.0.3115 or newer or newer and Windows WebPAM version 2.2.0.13 or newer. It is not compliant with BIOS v2.00.0.31..."

The older version will work with that BIOS -- but I have that BIOS and that driver version, and it turns my machine into a brick every couple of days.

On a whim, I tried downloading the BIOS updater for the TX4310 card, since the support page for the TX4300 says that that card is no longer sold and the new version is the TX4310. The 4310 does offer BIOS v2.5.1.3116, so I tried downloading that.

The instructions for that insist that the BIOS updater must be run from a floppy disk. I thought maybe the instructions were out of date, but no, the updater refuses to run from a hard drive, even a hard drive that's not connected to the Promise card.

It turns out we don't actually stock floppy disks in the supply rooms here at Microsoft anymore, but my admin was helpful enough to bring one in that she dug up at home for me.

At which point I realized that my PC doesn't have a floppy disk drive.

I filled out the web form on Promise's site last Friday and explained all of this. I immediately got the auto email response, and then nothing. Tuesday night, I emailed to ask about the status of my request. Nothing.

So, to recap: my RAID drivers hang my machine (even worse than crashing, since at least if it crashed, it would reboot automatically), I can't get a new BIOS that's required for the new driver, and even if I could, it would require a floppy drive that I don't have. And their support staff is ignoring me.

Anyone have any recommendations for a SATA RAID card that doesn't suck?

Posted by Mike at August 25, 2006 02:21 PM