Promise controller and 5.2

[Tom Glover]

I am running 5.2-RELEASE with a Promise S150 TX4 Serial ATA RAID
controller and a couple of WDC SATA drives at RAID 1. I am noticing some
behavior that does not seem right to me.

Systems boots fine on the two mirrored drives. If I disconnect the drive
on channel 2 then the system continues to run. However if I disconnect the
drive on channel 1 it dies. It appears that there is a primary drive on
channel 1 and a secondary on channel 2 and the system is running on the
primary. Perhaps I am confused on my ideas of RAID 1 but I was under the
impression that either drive could fail and the system keep going. Am I
wrong? If I am not does anyone have any ideas?

If I reboot after the drive on channel 1 fails I can recover and boot off
the drive on channel 2. However, the Promise S150 BIOS throws up an error
message about the drive failure that requires manual intervention before
boot can proceed. There does not appear to be any way around that. This,
IMIHO, is brain dead and makes the controller useless for any remote
operation. If this is SOP for Promise then can someone suggest a SATA RAID
controller that behaves in a more sane manner?

--
Tom Glover