Computing
- Promise Fasttrack100 TX2 IDE Raid Controller
This RAID controller has two IDE channels
supporting a maximum of 4 Hard Drives
The card supports numerous RAID
configurations: RAID 0, RAID 1, RAID 0+1 & JBOD
My system is using 4 IBM Hard Drives in a RAID
0+1 (Striping Plus Mirroring) array, this gives me both a
performance increase from the two HD's running in RAID 0 and
also offers me redundancy from the RAID 1 (Mirroring).
The Data is striped across a 2 HD RAID 0 array
which is in turn mirrored across to two further drives (RAID 1).
Any one HD and most combinations of two can fail without any
form of data loss or downtime, the PC will still quite happily
run with failed disks, although performance and/or redundancy
will be lost whilst I do so.
Because this system has no "Hot Swappable"
capability, to replace a failed disk requires me to down the
machine. The HD can then simply be replaced with a brand new
unit, the Windows based software will then rebuild the array
once loaded.
The Promise Fasttrak100 TX2 RAID controller
was chosen over one based on a Highpoint chipset for a few
reasons:
- The first reason is that in tests the
Promise unit utilises less of the CPU during operation,
leaving it free to do other things.
- The Internet is full of stories of people
experiencing problems getting Highpoint based cards up and
running under Windows 2000 & Windows XP
- Benchmarks also show that a RAID 0+1
configuration can give similar performance to a pure RAID 0
array when used on a Promise controller, on a Highpoint
controller the same RAID configuration suffers in
performance.
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