Which is better, the Promise or the Highpoint RAID controllers?

[mwtrull]

Which is better, the Promise or the Highpoint on-board RAID controllers?

I am hoping this discussion will help me decide between MSI's 694D and Abit's VP6 dual processor boards.

 

[Dameon]

Promise by far. Highpoint has some issues with drivers that have still not been worked out to my satisfaction

 

[senior guy]

Yeah, and I'm pretty sure that Asus integrates Promise's RAID controller into their new A7V133...

 

[OS]

highpoint sucks ass. They haven't updated their NT4/win2k drivers for over half a year now for the hpt366 and the drivers are still broken in their current state. I swear that I will not ever even consider a motherboard with a highpoint controller on it in the future, those things are liabilities and not features.

 

[Raincity]

I second Outersquare opinion. I would not ever touch another mainboard with a Lowpoint controller attached to it ever again.

Rain

 

[Dulanic]

Promise.... and BTW senior guy it is optional on the A7V133, tho most have it. Mine has it.

 

[LXi]

Just wait til you see somebody come in and yell HighPoint rocks...

For now I'd say Promise hands down.

 

[Leo V]

Well it's always good to have competition... even if it sucks

 

[senior guy]

Dulanic: "...(RAID)is optional on the A7V133, tho most have it."

Is there a identifying model number to specify so that anyone ordering an A7V133 can be sure that they are getting the integrated Promise controller?

 

[Dulanic]

Unfortunetely no, I have yet to see one without RAID, but its always worth calling the place if it doesnt specify Promise controller on their page. I got mine from HardwarePro.com for $159 I know theirs have RAID.

 

[senior guy]

Yeah Dulanic, that's really too bad (disappointing that Asus is doing that sort of thing). But thanks for the tip where to get one with RAID!

 

[Mustanggt]

HighPoint rocks... LOL When is that dam MSI turbo coming out I want one.

 

[mwtrull]

After doing some research at 2cpu.com, it appears that the Promise controller on MSI's 694D is actually a FastTrack "lite" controller. As such, it does not support all of the features one would expect from Promise's FastTrack 100.

Does this alter the relative standing between Promise and the Highpoint controllers?

Thank you for the lively discussion!

Michael

 

[LXi]

There is the AMI controller, used on Iwill and Asus motherboards, its very decent, better than HighPoint at least.

 

[Dug]

There's nothing wrong with the highpoint controller as long as you have the 370 chip. I would like to see why you guys think it sucks. Some examlples would be nice, instead of a general 'it sucks comment'. 99.9% of raid problems come from user error not the controller.

 

[~zonker~]

I'm not having any trouble with the Highpoint controller on the KT7A, their drivers were updated on 12/26/00, btw link

Actually I'm quite pleased with the performance

 

[sharkeeper]

<< Just wait til you see somebody come in and yell HighPoint rocks... >>



Well, I have both and use both. The only advantage Promise has over Highpoint at this time is a full selection of stripe sizes from 1K to 1024K. I wish Highpoint had this.

The 370 performs well and without a problem. I just attached a pair of WD 400BB retail disks and I must say the benchmarks (HD Tach and ATTO) look VERY dissapointing compared to the 75 GXP IBM. No stability problems whatsoever.

I don't know if the controller is experiencing the &quot;Maxtor Syndrome&quot; with the Western Digitals or not. The HD Tach graph looks very smooth for a striped pair but reads stay below 40,000 for the array! The IBM drives peaked at 77,000 but the graph had a few downspikes.





<< 99.9% of raid problems come from user error not the controller. >>


True, true!

Cheers!

 

[Pariah]

&quot;99.9% of raid problems come from user error not the controller.&quot;

I guess I fall in the other .1% as the highpoint controller on my KT7 is completely worthless. It literally doesn't do anything. I had 4 identical WD drives and did some experimenting with them and the onboard RAID controller and never got anything to work. My original intention was to run the 4 drives in a RAID 0 + 1 array. I went through the BIOS menus and tried to set one up. All four drives were detected properly yet whenever I selected 0 + 1 it told me I didn't have enough drives. Huh? Things only got worse from there. I tried setting up a stripe using 4, 3, and 2 drives which would setup properly, then would try to format the array and nothing would do it. DOS, win2k diskmanager, win98, partitionmagic all locked during attempted formats. After giving up on RAID, I just tried hooking a single drive to the controller to see what the result would be and the thing was seriously screwed up. In win2k it brought my whole system to an absolute crawl even when I wasn't accessing the drive. I don't know if there is an incompatability between the controller and WD drives, but I was underwhelmed to say the least. The WD drives are all fine as I was able to set up a 4 drive software stripe in win2k using a Promise ATA 100 controller without a hitch.

 

[sharkeeper]

Sounds like a bad board to me.

I've set up about six KT7 RAID boards and one KT7A without a problem. I have NOT tried 0+1 with four drives as you mentioned, however. Works without a hitch with two drives. Western Digital (brand new 400BB drives) as well as IBM 75 GXP disks. Windows NT, NT Server, 9x including 98 and ME, and Windows 2000 Professional and Advanced Servant.

Work like a charm. I flashed all mobo's to the latest official BIOS (WW) with the RAID BIOS version v1.03b1.

You can download that bios here.

Cheers!

 

[Dug]

Pariah- Obviously you have a bad motherboard if you can't even run one drive off of it. (Abit has a high RMA rate) That doesn't mean highpoint sucks. You could of easily had a board with a Promise controller with the same thing happening. That doesn't mean Promise sucks. I don't think either one is better than the other. If you read through posts at Storage Review, the general consencous is that the Hightpoint a better controller. BTW, I had the same problem as you until I chose the raid array as the boot drive in the Highpoint bios, along with boot to scsi in the motherboard bios.

 

[Pariah]

I didn't say highpoint sucked, I said mine was worthless, which it obviously is.

 

[chuckieland]

so much problem
I need raid too, but i want 100% Hardware, and it has to be an PCI card for IDE HD
anyone got a brand for me, and a webstore i can buy them at?

 

[dougjnn]

Highpoint got a bad rep with its 366 controller. There may be something wrong with the chipset which they haven't figured a driver work around totally for. Anyway, there seem to be all sorts of compatibility problems with that.

The 370 chipset which ships on the latest Abit raid boards seems to have a lot fewer problems. Mostly none. From what I can tell. I'm about to order the Abit KT7A-raid this week I think.

I'm still a little confused about what drivers i should and shouldn't download for it before starting up, however. There's the new Via 4 in 1 driver set. But maybe the newest isn't good? I assume I want the latest Abit and Highpoint drivers for the board from their site. Anything else?

Video card looks to be the Radeon 64 w/VIVO. Though that's a coming week buy also. Possibly the eVGA GF2 32 gts w/TV out.

Chuckieland, if I was buying a stand alone card for raid I'd get the Promise 100 card, however. I've heard of fewer driver issues.