You will have to pay me a very, very, very large sum of money if you EVER expect me to use a new piece of Promise hardware again.  I will never, ever buy, recommend, suggest, or even MENTION their products to anyone.  (I will spend that money on a new machine with Adaptec drive controllers in it.)

Promise Technology Inc (www.promise.com) has simply disappointed me for the last time.

All the countless hours of wasted time, headaches, frustration...

When they tell you that only ONE of their cards will work in a computer, they mean it.  Ridiculous.  I had a Fast Trak TX2000 and a FastTrak S150.  This problem manifested itself as a SCSI HDD problem.  Somehow, having both of those cards caused my onboard SCSI Adaptec controller to fail.  Fine - its not their fault for my wasted hours! =)

So I put TWO Adaptec 1210SA cards in a server and boot.  No problems! They even TALK to each other and I can configure BOTH from within ONE BIOS interface.  Tightness.

Its the end of the proof.  Promise is simply delivering sketchy hardware with sketchy drivers.  Downtime.  Strange BIOS behaviour.  Random BSOD, hard crashes - and its not just THIS card.  I've had it in LOTS of machines.  Rip the card out, and EVERYTHING starts working.  Replace the card, same problem.  Its not isolated to specific products, or specific configurations.  Their cards simply cause strange things.

Don't waste your time.  Buy the more expensive Adaptec stuff - there's a reason for the price difference.  You'll thank me.

Update:
I have noticed that the Nov 16 2004 drivers listed on Adaptec's site causes random hangs at system startup, just before the Windows logo comes up.

The June 15th 2005 drivers are stable and are fine, as far as I can tell.  Anyone else notice strange crashes?