Promise FastTrak S150 SX4 a bit of 'alright

IT OBVIOUSLY DIDN'T take too long for Serial ATA to take off: even though there are no tangible performance benefits compared to ATA133 in single-drive systems (or dual-drive systems with single drive per channel), SATA offers easier cabling and setup, dedicated bandwidth per drive, less overall clutter and many more possible drive connectors, even on mainboard - making multiple-drive systems more technically feasible.

Promise, one of the leaders in the emerging PC RAID market, recently announced its 4-channel PCI SATA RAID card, the FastTrak S150 SX4. With a proper hardware RAID controller and up to 256 MB local ECC SDRAM, this card is a welcome refresh from the usual bunch of pure software RAIDs that burden the CPU, or hard/soft - "limp" RAIDs.

The 2/3 length 32-bit PCI card supports either 33 MHz or 66 MHz PCI flavour - if using a fast RAID setup, the 66 MHz PCI may be required to bring out the maximum performance from the card. I set up the FastTrak S150 SX4, added an extra 256 MB cache PC133 ECC RAM, and installed it in a dual Xeon 2.8 GHz system with Asus mainboard, 512 MB ECC registered DDR SDRAM, Windows XP Professional SP1 and, as primary mass storage, and four 80 GB Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 native SATA hard disks.

Using the Promise BIOS FastBuild utility, we set up the four identical drives as a 3+1 RAID5 setup. We tried to use Windows 2003 Server, but its setup did not work with the initially provided drivers - Promise now has the updated drivers on their web site. That is why we stuck to Windows XP, where the drivers were running beautifully.

Overall, knowing this is a RAID5 in hardware, with all the ECC calculation and XOR overhead, the results are quite impressive - yes, one factor was that 66 MHz PCI was used, but still, this is just the beginning - Promise now also have 8-drive SATA RAID solutions on full 64-bit PCI-X bus. In that case, you could have a 5-disk RAID5 plus a hot spare, and extra room for the future, all on one card. µ