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SATA RAID CARD ROUNDUP
Promise Technology FastTrak S150SX4-M
Promise Technology made
a name for itself by building more affordable RAID
solutions such as HBAs and controller ASICs.
It's main competitor was Highpoint Tech while more
established names such as LSI and Adaptec were
considered a tier above them. Today, Promise
makes enterprise-grade controllers and RAID cards as
well.
TheFastTrak S150SX4-M is
quite a large board for a 4-port SATA RAID controller. It
only uses a 32-bit
PCI interface, but up to 66MHz. It has a buzzer
and a stick 64MB of socketed cache memory on board. Like the
AMCC 3ware card, the S150SX4-M has four Marvell
PATA-SATA
converters, one per port. A central ASIC handles the RAID duties. Click
on the thumbnails below to see details photos of the
card itself:
 
Here are some specs from
the Promise Technology website:
• Four-port
Serial ATA RAID controller with 1.5Gbps per channel
• 32-Bit/66MHz
PCI 2.2 interface
•
Support for RAID level 0, 1, 10, 5 and JBOD
•
Online array expansion and RAID level migration to
add capacity on the fly
•
Supports hot swap of failed drives
•
Automatic/manual rebuild of hot spare drive
•
PerfectRAID technology for robust error handling and
recovery of fatal, media and disk errors
• Variable
stripe block size support enables optimization for
diverse application requirements
•
64MB of ECC cache memory
•
Seamless upgrade to Promise's external storage
solutions
The Promise Array
Management software allows users to configure the
RAID card from within Windows. Here, alerts
through popups or emails can be configured:
The controller's caching
and other parameters can be easily viewed and set:
Here are the test results:
HARDWARE RAID_0
Hardware RAID_0, 4x
WD Raptor 740GD, 16k stripe size, Write Back
Hardware RAID_0, 4x
WD Raptor 740GD, 16k stripe size, Write Thru
Very strange ATTO results beyond 32k data size with
a 16k stripe size. Setting the cache to Write
Back has a slight improvement over Write Thru.
Hardware RAID_0, 4x
WD Raptor 740GD, 64k stripe size, Write Back
Hardware RAID_0, 4x
WD Raptor 740GD, 64k stripe size, Write Thru
Again, better performance with Write Back. But
more importantly, tremendous performance improvement
with a 64k stripe size.
Hardware RAID_0, 2x
WD Raptor 740GD, 64k stripe size, Write Thru
With only two drives, performance is reduced
linearly compared to the 4-drive test.
SOFTWARE RAID_1
Hardware RAID_1, 2x
WD Raptor 740GD, Write Thru
Not impressive RAID_1 performance.
HARDWARE RAID_5
Hardware RAID_5, 4x
WD Raptor 740GD, 64k stripe size, Write Thru
Very good RAID_5 scores here. Not much
performance loss over RAID_0.
SOFTWARE RAID_0
Software RAID_0, 4x
WD Raptor 740GD
Software RAID_0, 2x
WD Raptor 740GD
With software RAID_0, performance isn't bad.
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