Kt-400 on-board RAID vs Promise TX2000

[Bishoop]

I plan on setting up two WD1800JB drives in RAID 1 configuration.

I have a Soyo Kt-400 Ultra board and looking for opinions as to using the
on-board RAID controller or investing in a Promise TX2000 controller.

I'm looking for reliability and ease of setup and minimal headaches.

Any comments/suggestions are appreciated.

 

[Jason Ash]

I plan on setting up two WD1800JB drives in RAID 1 configuration.

I have a Soyo Kt-400 Ultra board and looking for opinions as to using the
on-board RAID controller or investing in a Promise TX2000 controller.

I'm looking for reliability and ease of setup and minimal headaches.

Any comments/suggestions are appreciated.

I've got the KT400 Ultra Platinum, using the on-board RAID for 2 40Gb
drives in a RAID-0 array, and have had no problems. The one recommendation
I can make is if you are going to be loading this up as your system drive,
make sure you have NO other hard drives, or external drives connected.
Otherwise the drive letters will get goofy, and your system drive might end
up being something like D or E.

Jason A.

 

[Greg B]

I plan on setting up two WD1800JB drives in RAID 1 configuration.

I have a Soyo Kt-400 Ultra board and looking for opinions as to using the
on-board RAID controller or investing in a Promise TX2000 controller.

I'm looking for reliability and ease of setup and minimal headaches.

Any comments/suggestions are appreciated.

Using the same drives as you are, I found the on-board RAID to
be unreliable. It corrupted large files on write operations when
set to mirror in RAID 1. Needless to say, it wasn't particularly
what I was looking for when mirroring data for redundancy. This
was with latest drivers, tested good memory and adequate CPU.

I couldn't break it in non-RAID mode.

I have had good luck with Promise controllers and would suggeset that
they have a better product. Another advantage of going with the
off-board Promise controller is that if your motherboard goes
*poof* you should be able to move controller and drives to another
motherboard and have them work in reasonably short order.

The TX2000 looks like a really nice arrangement, too. Much more
professionally thought-out with the hot-swap drawers.

Greg