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1.
I strongly advise anyone AGAINST buying this card. Here's my experience:
1. The SMOR (ROM BIOS) utility has NO documentation. None. Not online. Not printed. Not on a CD. None. And it's hardly intuitive to use.
2. The Storage Manager software looks as if its been written by a college kid using 16-bit Windows. The UI is amateurish, looks hacked together, and makes simple operations obscure. At least it works, which brings me to...
3. The Storage Manager "Pro" software. I always get worried by a tool that starts by installing a Java runtime. And sure enough, attempts to run this software causes it to hang at the splash screen. I can only wake it up by using Task Manager to kill the splash process, at whcih point the SMPro does wake up. Go figure.
ALl of this hardly inspires confidence. Then we get to the software updates. Lots of those. Most of them need to be burned onto the card but try figuring out which ones you need from the Adaptec web site. Ha! Why are there TWO different BIOS updates with the same rev number? Which should you use "L" or "F"??? No-one knows, and the Adaptec Web site certainly won't tell you.
Oh, you'll also have to read a bunch of readme.txt files on the CDROM, then additional ones on the web site, all of which tell you to do different, contradictory things.
So after 24 hours I got the beast running. Seems to work. After 3 weeks I get a drive failure -- infant mortality, but not to worry because I have a spare drive (planned ahead). But wait -- the drive hasn't totally failed yet, it's just gone into "500 retry" mode, causing all access to the RAID 5 array to slow by 500x. OK, lets' swap out the bad drive. But which one is it? Aha! No way to tell. ONE drive is pretty much on all the time (seeking), but since like most modern IDE disks there is no drive LED, I cannot twll which drive has failed. Perhaps the 2400A can help? No way!!! It's oblivious to any problem -- the fact that a drive is now taking 40-50 seconds to read a sector doesn't seem to flag a problem to this card! Business as usual! No errors, no warnings, no diagnostics, nothing from the BIOS. Silence.
What about all those LEDs on the card? It's lit up like a christmas tree, but none of the LEDs tell you anything useful (like, which drive is currently being accessed!!!).
So I have to resport to guessing. Unplug drives one by one until I find the bad drive, plugging back in after each try so the RAID 5 array should be able to recover.
"SHould be able" is about right. After the second try I find the bad drive, replace it and .... Yes, you guessed it, the 2400A has trashed the RAID array!! All data gone.
So, we have: (a) inadequate, amateurish software tools. (b) Inability to tell when a drive is bad and/or inform the user (c) trashes RAID 5 array when a drive is removed (isn't that the whole point of RAID 5???).
What a load of junk. I dumped this for a 3ware product -- which works like a dream.
1. The SMOR (ROM BIOS) utility has NO documentation. None. Not online. Not printed. Not on a CD. None. And it's hardly intuitive to use.
2. The Storage Manager software looks as if its been written by a college kid using 16-bit Windows. The UI is amateurish, looks hacked together, and makes simple operations obscure. At least it works, which brings me to...
3. The Storage Manager "Pro" software. I always get worried by a tool that starts by installing a Java runtime. And sure enough, attempts to run this software causes it to hang at the splash screen. I can only wake it up by using Task Manager to kill the splash process, at whcih point the SMPro does wake up. Go figure.
ALl of this hardly inspires confidence. Then we get to the software updates. Lots of those. Most of them need to be burned onto the card but try figuring out which ones you need from the Adaptec web site. Ha! Why are there TWO different BIOS updates with the same rev number? Which should you use "L" or "F"??? No-one knows, and the Adaptec Web site certainly won't tell you.
Oh, you'll also have to read a bunch of readme.txt files on the CDROM, then additional ones on the web site, all of which tell you to do different, contradictory things.
So after 24 hours I got the beast running. Seems to work. After 3 weeks I get a drive failure -- infant mortality, but not to worry because I have a spare drive (planned ahead). But wait -- the drive hasn't totally failed yet, it's just gone into "500 retry" mode, causing all access to the RAID 5 array to slow by 500x. OK, lets' swap out the bad drive. But which one is it? Aha! No way to tell. ONE drive is pretty much on all the time (seeking), but since like most modern IDE disks there is no drive LED, I cannot twll which drive has failed. Perhaps the 2400A can help? No way!!! It's oblivious to any problem -- the fact that a drive is now taking 40-50 seconds to read a sector doesn't seem to flag a problem to this card! Business as usual! No errors, no warnings, no diagnostics, nothing from the BIOS. Silence.
What about all those LEDs on the card? It's lit up like a christmas tree, but none of the LEDs tell you anything useful (like, which drive is currently being accessed!!!).
So I have to resport to guessing. Unplug drives one by one until I find the bad drive, plugging back in after each try so the RAID 5 array should be able to recover.
"SHould be able" is about right. After the second try I find the bad drive, replace it and .... Yes, you guessed it, the 2400A has trashed the RAID array!! All data gone.
So, we have: (a) inadequate, amateurish software tools. (b) Inability to tell when a drive is bad and/or inform the user (c) trashes RAID 5 array when a drive is removed (isn't that the whole point of RAID 5???).
What a load of junk. I dumped this for a 3ware product -- which works like a dream.
[Posted by: Tim Hill 
| Date: 07/19/03 10:38:37 AM]
| Date: 07/19/03 10:38:37 AM]
