[Gllug] SATA controller

[- Tethys]

Grrr... sometimes I hate the IT industry. Why do we keep making the
same mistakes over and over again? Why can I not take a SATA 3Gb/s
drive and plug it into a motherboard that only supports SATA 1.5Gb/s?
I mean come on... I still have ancient SCSI hardware that just works
with newer, faster SCSI controllers. Was it that hard to do the same
for SATA? I know in theory it's meant to be backwardly compatible, but
in the real world, it just isn't :-(

So anyway, I had a couple of hard drives die over the weekend. Eeek.
Different manufacturers, so no bad batch problems. This seemed a
little suspicious to me. I know that drives do just fail, and it could
have been coincidence. But this machine has been sat in the same
location for 5+ years now, with no changes in environmental
conditions. To have 2 drives fail within 24 hours? Both disks are
connected to the same controller, which makes me wonder if that's
where the fault lies. This is reinforced by the fact that one of the
drives seems to work perfectly when connected to the motherboard (the
other one isn't found due to the above mentioned SATA backward
compatibility problems, and the new drive I just bought is also not
found when connected to the motherboard).

After connecting the new drive and a tediously long time restoring
from backup, I'm now thinking of getting a new SATA controller, just
to rule it out as a cause for the problems I've been having. Does
anyone have any recommendations? I'm looking at the Promise SATA300
TX4. Anything else I should be considering? I don't need RAID. I do
that in software. I just need a way to connect a bunch of drives up
(ideally 4).

Tet

-- 
“It seems intuitively obvious to me, which means that it might be
wrong.” -- Chris Torek
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