It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of a working Promise RAID controller, it was the age of a failed Promise RAID controller…

My motherboard has two on board Sata RAID controllers – one Promise FastTrack 378 controller and one Intel ICH5 controller. They are far from enterprise-grade, but they get the job done…most of the time. I began having problems with the ICH5 controller awhile back, where the controller would suddenly “lose” one or both of the drives in my RAID 0 array. Obviously this is a problem, but I stuck with that controller until I couldn’t take it any more.

I finally decided to give up on the Intel controller, so I started shopping around for a new SATA II controller card, capable of RAID 0. I narrowed down my options and settled on a Promise FastTrack TX2300 card, figuring that since my current Promise controller had a good track record, adding another Promise card would be great.

That assumption couldn’t have been further from the truth. Let’s just say the card didn’t live up to its “Promise”…

Sad, sad puns aside, trying to get the new card to work was a nightmare.  After many days of trying and some interesting troubleshooting later, I was just about ready to give up.  Connecting the new card to my hard drives would not allow my system to boot, no matter what I tried.  I finally found a comment by someone in a random forum who had similar problems with a similar on board Promise controller.

The final verdict?

Well, it seems that they were able to get a response from Promise technical support who told them, in broken English, that you cannot use an on board Promise controller with a separate Promise controller board.  In no way were the two compatible.  In short, Promise controllers do not work with other Promise controllers!

I promptly boxed my Promise card up, sent it back to Newegg, and went shopping for a new card.  I settled on a Highpoint RocketRaid 1720 card which worked like a charm once it was installed.  It took 2 minutes to install and has been nothing but easy to use.

The lesson here is Never buy a Promise product and expect it to work with any other Promise product.

I really wish they would have stated that there would be a conflict on their web site, or in the product documentation, but it was nowhere to be found.

So now you know…and knowing is half the battle.