Promise FastTrak S150 TX2plus - no Vista for you?

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evildre

[H]F Junkie
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Hi all, I've got a Promise FastTrak S150 TX2plus in my system. Currently, there are two 500GB Seagate hard drives in RAID 1. The array is approximately 70% full.

I had a 250GB Seagate 7200.8 IDE drive laying around and decided that I wanted to try Windows Vista. I disconnected my 6 SATA drives, plugged in the IDE Seagate, and loaded Windows Vista Ultimate x64. Much to my surprise, Vista liked my hardware once I got the drivers loaded -- including my nVidia DualTV card. It took a bit of coercion to get my Logitech G5 mouse to work, though.

Satisfied with this success, I switched off the PC, reconnected all of my SATA drives, changed the hard disk priority in the BIOS to boot from IDE first, and fired away. That's when the problem started: I was able to see all of my drives except for my 500GB array. Despite what the Microsoft website says, the card is not recognized by Vista. And, again despite what the Microsoft website says, the manufacturer's website does not have the drivers available for download. Yes, they have x64 drivers, but they are beta and haven't been updated since 2003. At this point, I went back into the system BIOS and changed the hard disk priority back to SATA first, which brings me back to Windows XP MCE2005.

So ... does anybody know where I can get the Windows Vista x64 drivers for my Promise FastTrak S150 TX2plus card? If not, then is there a 2-channel PCI or PCIe x1 SATA RAID card that I can buy that is fully supported under Windows Vista x64?

Preemptive warning: yes, I want to stay with a 64-bit operating system. No, nothing you say will change my mind. Don't even attempt to talk me out of it.
 
Are there XP x64 drivers for that controller? If so they should work just fine. I just installed Vista using the Win2K Promise Ultra100 drivers; Vista has no issues with using them, so I wouldn't expect you to have issues with XP x64 drivers for that controller either.
 
I don't see any Vista drivers at the Promise site. Perhaps this card is too old to get Vista drivers, though they do have a 64-bit driver posted.

I'd contact Promise and ask them what the status of the product is, and if drivers will soon be made available.
 
drizzt81 said:
have you e-mailed promise about this?
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Indeed I have, I e-mailed them about 20 minutes before I posted this thread. If they responded, I will know their answer when I get to the office.

bbz_Ghost said:
Are there XP x64 drivers for that controller? If so they should work just fine. I just installed Vista using the Win2K Promise Ultra100 drivers; Vista has no issues with using them, so I wouldn't expect you to have issues with XP x64 drivers for that controller either.
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The XP x64 drivers they have are betas that haven't been touched since 2003. I have tried the drivers they made available and, while the drivers installed successfully, the OS still didn't communicate with the card.

mikeblas said:
I don't see any Vista drivers at the Promise site. Perhaps this card is too old to get Vista drivers, though they do have a 64-bit driver posted.

I'd contact Promise and ask them what the status of the product is, and if drivers will soon be made available.
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Thanks, as I mentioned above I have sent a message to Promise about the card. I don't imagine they'll respond, let alone respond favorably, so I think I should start looking for a new RAID card :)
 
...so nothing from Promise yet.

I see that HighPoint cards explicitly support Windows Vista 32-bit and 64-bit in their driver offerings on HighPoint's website. Are these cards any good? Are they worthy replacements for my Promise card?
 
Bluntly, Promise sucks. They have really iffy drivers and sketchy implementations. High Point cards are pretty good; I use 'em at home. 3Ware and Areca cards are great.
 
mikeblas said:
Bluntly, Promise sucks. They have really iffy drivers and sketchy implementations. High Point cards are pretty good; I use 'em at home. 3Ware and Areca cards are great.
Click to expand...

I've used Promise cards for a while and, believe it or not, I've had no trouble with them until now. I took a look at 3Ware cards and, while I know their reputation precedes them, I don't see any Vista drivers on their site. I've also looked at Adaptec card but haven't seen any relatively inexpensive PCIe cards with Vista support. Haven't looked at Areca, to be honest.

If I don't hear from Promise by tomorrow afternoon, I'm going to look through all of the HighPoint listings on Newegg and pick the one that suits my wants and needs. To think, I used to talk so much smack about HighPoint during the KT133 days when their chips were integrated into Abit boards ... :D
 
evildre said:
I've used Promise cards for a while and, believe it or not, I've had no trouble with them until now.
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I'd believe it, but I think I might be considering a larger population than you are.
 
mikeblas said:
I'd believe it, but I think I might be considering a larger population than you are.
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This is true ... you probably don't know this, but I used to work for a Chicago-area white box builder between 1999 and 2005. God only knows how many systems left that shop with RAIDs on Promise cards ;) You may still be considering a larger audience, though, as the place I used to work for was literally a 4-man shop.
 
evildre said:
This is true ... you probably don't know this, but I used to work for a Chicago-area white box builder between 1999 and 2005. God only knows how many systems left that shop with RAIDs on Promise cards ;)
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What matters is: how many came back?

When I was at Microsoft, Promise was the scourge of the hardware social alias. (One of my friends lost a RAID 5 array because the Promise BIOS was bunked -- it couldn't rebuild the array after he lost a drive and replaced it. That wasn't an isolated incident in that set of people.)

I also don't know anybody who worked on the error reporting projects that thought they were doing well with their drivers.

We bought a round of external IDE RAID to SCSI arrays for my team. This was in 2001 or so, when the WD1000JBB drives were the shizmat. They worked okay, but were slower than death. We never tried any recovery, since we mostly ran RAID 0 for the database and sample data. And it was testing data, anyway, and so on.

It's your money, and maybe they've gotten better over time -- everybody tends to -- but I wouldn't buy any of their products.
 
mikeblas said:
What matters is: how many came back?

When I was at Microsoft, Promise was the scourge of the hardware social alias. (One of my friends lost a RAID 5 array because the Promise BIOS was bunked -- it couldn't rebuild the array after he lost a drive and replaced it. That wasn't an isolated incident in that set of people.)

I also don't know anybody who worked on the error reporting projects that thought they were doing well with their drivers.

We bought a round of external IDE RAID to SCSI arrays for my team. This was in 2001 or so, when the WD1000JBB drives were the shizmat. They worked okay, but were slower than death. We never tried any recovery, since we mostly ran RAID 0 for the database and sample data. And it was testing data, anyway, and so on.

It's your money, and maybe they've gotten better over time -- everybody tends to -- but I wouldn't buy any of their products.
Click to expand...

Believe it or not, there was a minimal number that came back -- maybe 2 of hundreds. Reminds me of the Plextor vs Lite-On experiment I did (two 100-system orders w/same motherboard, one order with Lite-Ons and the other with Plextors, 7 Lite-Ons came back as defective compared to 4 Plextors).

That said, I'm not buying a Promise card again; you're right, it is my money, and if I want to use freakin' 64-bit Vista then I'll do whatever it is I need to go in order to get it working :D (No, I won't pirate the OS ... I outgrew using pirated copies of Windows before XP was released :p)

I might also upgrade my CPU (currently an Athlon 64 3500+) in the process, as the Promise BIOS is what's currently holding me back ... I can't update my A8N-SLI past 1008 to support dual-core lovin' when the Promise card is installed :p
 
So ... got it :D
rr2300.jpg


It's running happily in my system under Windows Vista Ultimate x64 :cool:
 
Oh, look! It's silk-screened onto the card!

Maybe I'll go get some caffeine before I post any more.
 
Wouldn't be a bad idea for me, either - I was sitting here trying to remember what x4 pci express looks like as compared to x1 (the 2310 has x4, the 2300 is x1) and then I noticed that not only was it written on the card, someone had also posted and answered the question :p
 
unhappy_mage said:
Wouldn't be a bad idea for me, either - I was sitting here trying to remember what x4 pci express looks like as compared to x1 (the 2310 has x4, the 2300 is x1) and then I noticed that not only was it written on the card, someone had also posted and answered the question :p
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Yeah I noticed taht as well ... lots of PCIe x4 cards out there, but the A8N-SLI doesn't have any of those slots so they're pretty useless to me.

I moved all my data back onto the RAID and verified, it's running pretty well. Thanks for the advice, dudes :cool:
 
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