I've had a problem with my main computer for the longest time.

Every 180 seconds, like clockwork, there would be an audio dropout about 50-100ms long. Regardless of which sound card, which api (wave/dsound/ks), regardless of buffer size.

I tried *everything*. I painstakingly disabled every non-essential service, disabled non-essential hardware, in fact replaced every part of the computer including cpu, memory, motherboard, gfx cards, leaving only the raid controller and the 4 sata hard drives in the system. Glitches remained.

I had an ASUS P4P800-E Deluxe, P4-3.4 HT before - after replacing everything I'm running an Intel D955XBKLKR board with a Pentium-D 940 now. The raid controller is a Promise Fasttrak S150 SX4-M and the drives are four seagate 400gb ST3400832AS SATA drives.


When the glitches remained, in a last effort, I took the raid controller out and connected an old PATA hard drive, installed a fresh copy of WinXP SP2. No glitches.

I then reinserted the raid controller, but still booted off the new PATA drive with the fresh installed, and added the driver for the raid card. Glitches are back!

At this point I called Promise support, explaining what was happening, and how I was sure that it was the controller/drivers fault. Naturally, the tech support guy was no help whatsoever:

-Blamed my hardware (as if two completely different systems would have the same problem)

-Suggested I return the card to them for another one of the same model (as if a hardware device could function perfectly in every other way, and magically have a glitch like this). They would of course not exchange it for a different card, because they "don't do upgrades". So I am to be without my computer for weeks, only to then receive something that will not fix the problem?

He a also suggested I buy a different card. So they won't acknowledge the problem with card A, but want me to spend money on their card B? Is he for real?? "That will be a different brand" was my answer, of course.

I tried explaining to him that the problem is probably in *every* unit of this type, but was told this was impossible, that they've tested things so thoroughly, there's no way they could have missed. In fact, a 50 millisecond dropout could certainly be ignored by someone not listening critically, when it happens as "infrequently" as every 3 minutes.


What really surprised me was to have problems like this with a card they've marketed for audio/video streaming. (I guess they meant servers, not workstations, but come on!)


.....


Anyway. I guess my whole point of this post is threefold. To vent, to warn, and to ask you guys whether you have any similar experiences.

Performance wise, this was an excellent controller. It also wasn't cheap, I paid almost $300 for it, and it pisses me off to not be able to use it, as well as all the wasted time having to reinstalling my main computer and not be able to work, as well as the MONTHS of having to work around this issue (by playing audio via other computers)..

How would you handle something like this? Any suggestions appreciated, as long as it doesn't involve reinstalling again (i'm done reinstalling for now).

I'm currently running the hard drives on the on-board intel SATA raid in matrix mode. One 300gb RAID-10 volume for safekeeping, and one 900gb RAID-0 volume for temp and non-important files and fast access. This works great for now.


Thanks,

///Leif

I had similar problems with Promise cards, Ultra100 TX2 and Ultra133 TX2 (non-RAID PATA) under Win2000 (but not Win98). I also tried everything from vanilla Windoze installs, non-APCI installs, barebones h/w configs and registry tweaking. The solution came unexpectedly from Promise's tech support. I had emailed them without really expecting anything beyond the boilerplate, but the reply came as the terse
:)
and attached was an old version that was not available for download from their site. A reboot later, the problem was gone.

I bet the driver is the culprit in your case as well. If the card targets the server enviroment, you may be SOL, though. Sound hardware is not expected to work flawlessly there.

HTH

I would always favor the SATA controller on the mainboard (the one from the chipset, not additional integrated ones).



This is a double-edged sword. Often times it's good to make compromises and choose the more popular (better selling) hardware: More people use it, more people submit reports about problems, more updated firmwares/drivers get released. If you buy a more expensive, but much less popular model (don't know how it is in your case), you might regret it later when the updates are sparse.