I’ve been thoroughly unimpressed with the Linux support for my Promise FastTrack S150 SX4 serial IDE RAID controller card.
- They don’t provide a kernel module for 2.6, nor the source code to compile your own.
- They provide a monitoring RPM, but they distributed the RPM zipped in a zip file. The zip file ends up being larger than the rpm inside of it (because most of the data within the RPM is already compressed).
- The file /usr/share/doc/ptisxutils-1.30.0/README has CR/LF line endings.
These people obviously don’t give a damn about supporting Linux, and I’ll probably never buy anything from them again. Lessons learned?
- If your company is going to claim to support Linux, don’t be half-assed about it.
- If using hardware RAID makes you dependent on a closed-source driver, then you’re better off using Linux’s software RAID.