Promise Technology

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Promise Technology manufactures ATA and SATA (RAID) controllers, which usually feature Promise chips for the device interface and nearly always no RAID CPU, therefore they are "soft-RAIDs" (except the higher-priced models).

Stay away from the Promise-based (PDCxxxxx) IDE-Controllers under Linux (and probably other Opensource OS too). They WILL cause (mostly silent) data corruption. Get a Silicon Image based controller instead (Dawicontrol DC-133 for example).

A typical Promise-induced failure looks like that (only visible when filesystem-metadata gets corrupted):

attempt to access beyond end of device
09:01: rw=0, want=1077936132, limit=5879424
EXT3-fs error (device md(9,1)): ext3_free_branches: Read failure, inode=82836, block=269484032
Aborting journal on device md(9,1).
ext3_abort called.
EXT3-fs abort (device md(9,1)): ext3_journal_start: Detected aborted journal
Remounting filesystem read-only
Remounting filesystem read-only
EXT3-fs error (device md(9,1)) in start_transaction: Journal has aborted
EXT3-fs error (device md(9,1)) in start_transaction: Journal has aborted
EXT3-fs error (device md(9,1)) in start_transaction: Journal has aborted

By this point the only thing you can do is reboot, fsck and pray.