# The Adaptec 2410SA SATA RAID Controller Has Too Many Issues

## gsurbey

This is a warning to all my friends out there not to buy an Adaptec 2410SA SATA RAID Controller (or other crappy Adaptec products for that matter).  Am I the only Gentoo user who has experienced bad hardware issues with this card, or were those last two posts just driver related?  So at one point I was thinking that this card might be having a heat issue.  But I just now found out what was causing my particular issue, because in my configuration I have 3x Western Digital Caviar WD2500JD 250GB drives in RAID-5.  I'm just posting this mostly to vent about how horrible Adaptec's engineers are for not handling this issue gracefully.

Although I do backup from time to time, I've still lost two days of data, my entire OS install, and days of my time troubleshooting the card.  All because Adaptec's crappy card firmware can not simply wait on a drive response long enough to ensure the data integrity of the array.  Even if the drive actually did drop, why does it currupt that area of the array?  I mean they could have outputted a warning message like "This hard drive is not responding as quick as it should" but instead they're like "let's just f*cking corrupt some data, woohoo".... I buy a RAID card so that I can entrust it with my data integrity, and instead this is the result I get.  UGHH!!  I absolutely love the 3ware and LSI stuff I've used.  This will also be the last hardware RAID card I buy without a battery backup; since I've learned that if you care about your data, that's pretty important as well.

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## gsurbey

Wow, even if I would have gotten Western Digital's RAID Edition Line of drives I wouldn't have been spared, shesh.  At least that guy was running software RAID and so he didn't have any data corruption like was in my case.  Well I guess WD takes some of the blame here as well.  At least their affected RE line of drives can be fixed via a firmware patch.

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## snIP3r

hi!

perhaps you have bought a faulty controller. do you have replaced it with a new one?

greets

snIP3r

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## gsurbey

Hi snIP3r.

Actually it's bad design on the controller's part when mixed with lax WD2500JD hard drives that are outside of the response latency threshold expected, and so the controller drops the drives as if they failed when they really didn't.  This is a vendor documented design flaw.  The controller should handle this gracefully, but it doesn't.  When a drive drops, the controller writes inconsistent data  across whatever spot it failed at and then it locks up and freezes I/O.  This is when 2 out of the 3 drives in the array are still online, and therefore the RAID-5 array should still be up and running regardless of the one drive that was dropped, but that's not what happens.  To sum it up, it first drops a perfectly good drive that it shouldn't have, and then it eats your data and freezes instead of gracefully dropping into degraded mode.  POS.

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## snIP3r

hi!

ok, after reading the adaptec document, ist also clear for me. so its better to either get other drives or return the controller...

greets

snIP3r

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