From: lance@hartmann.austin.ibm.com (Lance Hartmann)
Subject: Re: Promise "caching scsi controller" card for $200?
Summary: Personal experience with Promise Technology DC-2040 SCSI controller.
Date: Thu, 7 Jan 1993 14:55:49 GMT
Distribution: usa
Reply-To: lance%hartmann.austin.ibm.com@ibmpa.awdpa.ibm.com
Organization: IBM, Austin
Keywords: scsi disk promise technology dc-2040 cache

In article <MORGAN.93Jan6162125@dl5000.bc.edu> morgan@dl5000.bc.edu (Morgan Stair) writes:
>
>  Along with the speedstar 24x I can get a Promise caching scsi
>controller for $200.  I can handle putting the memory on the card, but
>I was wondering if anyone out there has one or has dealt with it
>before, and can give me some feedback before I sink $$ into it.  My
>friend that's selling it to me thinks it's a great card (he works in a
>computer store).

I purchased Promise Technology's DC-2040 -- cache SCSI controller this
year.  Until MOST recently, I have been VERY pleased with the board.
The controller appears as a Winchester (IDE) controller to the system
which is nice for compatibility sake.  In fact, one can enable 32-bit
disk access with this controller under Windows 3.1.  The controller
is upgradeable to 16MB, though I have 1MB on mine, now.

As I mentioned, I've been quite pleased with my controller until just
VERY recently.  I tried copying a directory structure (via XCOPY).
After performing the copy, I attempted to ensure that all was written
out properly by invoking Promise's utility, DCFL.EXE, which forces
a flush of the buffer cache.  Usually, the command completes fine with
a "Buffer cache flushed successfully" (or something like that).  However,
when I attempted to do this after using the XCOPY on a "largish"
directory, I noticed a slight delay after trying to flush the buffers
via DCFL.EXE and then received the message:

  Buffer cache flushed UNsuccessfully.

I had NEVER experienced any trouble in the past so this is quite new.  The
diagnostic utilities that accompanied the board fail to locate any problems.
I contacted Promise Technology and MUST (to date) emphasize how GREAT
their customer support has been.  I've been working with someone there
who goes by the name of "Guy".

Unfortunately, my problem still persists and just the other day I 
discovered another "problem".  When I enter a DOS shell from Windows 3.1
and try to flush the buffers via DCFL.EXE, Windows throws up a screen
saying that I may have a problem with my disk controller and after that
clears then another message (from DCFL.EXE presumably) states that no
"DC-2040 Controller Exists!".  Great, just great.

I'll be contacting Promise today to get an update on their progress.
Again, I'd like to emphasize that until most recently I've been VERY
pleased with the Promise DC-2040 SCSI controller and impressed by
the quality of efforts expended by the support from Promise.  I sincerely
hope that they can clear this problem soon.

For the record, I'm running a 486/50MHz, 256K cache, ISA "normal" speed,
8MB RAM, ETEQ chipset, AMI BIOS.  Since I've encountered no other
problems (and based on the current status of discussions with Promise),
I do NOT believe that I have any kind of hardware conflicts (base card
addresses, IRQs, DMAs, etc.), but I'm not going to rule it out completely.
It very well could be something that I've failed to stumbled across, yet.

I'll post an update as progress warrants....

Lance Hartmann (lance%hartmann.austin.ibm.com@ibmpa.awdpa.ibm.com)
               Yes, that IS a '%' (percent sign) in my network address.
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