Cheap cards causing corruption ??

[jay2472000]

Ok, Ill try to be brief as possible. 2 WHS boxes. One with a cheap Syba 4 port Sata card flashed to the latest bios ( this is it http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16815124020 ) and one with a Supermicro 8 port card ( http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16815121009 )

It seems no matter what, any drive on the server with the Syba card has issues and WHS has constant file errors. I have also seen in logs something to the effect of the Syba card not responding fast enough or something. So anyway, I have a new Supermicro card scheduled to arrive on Thursday, and will trash this Syba one soon, but was wondering if this is correct.. Can a cheap/bad card cause these types of errors? I would assume so since data has to be passed thru the card to the drive but then again I am kinda new to mass storage.

And FWIW I have ran a few disk check utilities on the "problem" drives and they found nothing (including the manufacturers ), yet when I run CHKDSK on them theres always errors, weird. And when I took some of the problem drives from the Syba WHS to the Supermicro WHS havent had any issues.

Mainly looking for confirmation is all, Thank you.

 

[Dangman]

Yeah, it's possible. They're cheap for a reason.

 

[sub.mesa]

What did you expect from Silicon Image RAID drivers?

Its not the card that implements RAID; its the drivers. The drivers you install for that "syba" controller (just a silicon image controller; syba put its sticker on it) are doing all the RAID stuff, and is about the lowest quality you can find.

The controller works fine with software RAID (either in windows or other OS) but generally you should not use their RAID drivers.

Cheap doesn't have to mean low quality; unfortunately on Windows that's often the case. To use cheap hardware and still get maximum reliability and performance you may want to dive deeper than Windows allows you. But often people have Intel chipsets and Intel is the only onboard RAID vendor with proper drivers.

But even Intel has broken arrays; so we can assume all onboard RAID on Windows is unsafe and prone to failure or corruption.

 

[jay2472000]

Yeah, I did a little research. Apparently, across pretty much every OS out there ; this card presents issues. Weird thing is when 500 Gb was considered large, it seemed to work fine ( although, I must confess, its on a much more refined OS with WHS versus Win XP as far a storage goes and I have personally learned a ton in the last few years)

@ Danny, yep "You get what you pay for" has been my philosophy for years, this happened before I adopted that policy Back in the first bought a house ; going to school part time ; and had first child days.

Sub, you have a point. Its actually a Silicon Image Sil3114 chipset FWIW. And there was no raid of any kind other than what WHS was using. So as far as most of what you said may be true, but not relevent in my case, maybe good to get the info out though so others can read.


Another FWIW, the Supermicro card at $100 is a bargain for what I need and so far has performed flawlessly.


EDIT ; This card was also in a Minty ( aka green Ubuntu ) and had issues there also with a 4Tb raid 0 array set up thru Mdadm. Freenas didnt like it either. I would reccommend avoiding it like the plague.