Mon, 10 Apr 2006

Holy Fuck!!!

Can people not make computer hardware that just works?!?!? Installation of some new ATA/133 cables makes the PCI IDE card detect a drive on the secondary bus, but when I transfer significant data to it, it craps itself. Great!
I've been kinda suspecting that the IDE card I got has been broken though, so I had purchased a replacement. I'll not comment on the stupidity of where they placed the IDE connectors on this card (clue: they're surface instead of edge mounted - which meant insufficient space to put connectors on and use the next PCI slot at the same time - How... Fucking... Intelligent!)
Replacing the IDE card revealed the following:

It's another fscking IDE RAID card. I don't bloody WANT RAID!!! I have software raid. Stop foisting shitty hardware RAID solutions on me. I just want normal, honest to goodness, working, IDE channels. kthxbye!
This card detects all the drives (Yay!) but:
plays some BIOS hackery to put "ATA133RAID" as a boot option in my BIOS (which is nice, maybe, if I wanted to boot off it at some point...)
BUT (and this takes the biscuit!) somehow fucks over my ability to boot off my SCSI card, which happens to have my boot disk on it.

How.... Fucking.... Very... Special!!!...

I am now of the opinion that iTE chipsets suck 'teh cocck' (as Euan would so aptly put it) and that I'm never again going to have a working fileserver without some kind of sacraficial rite involving goats, chickens, some kind of voodoo and the blood of some aria employee who keeps forgetting to mention that the IDE PCI cards they sell have RAID and/or the fscking ghey!
I am singularly unimpressed with computers!

</rant>
posted at: 18:17 | path: /rants | permanent link to this entry