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SATA RAID CARD ROUNDUP
Pacific Digital Talon ZL-150
Pacific Digital came
into the industry by developing the first PATA RAID
card designed to take advantage of IBM's
Tag-and-Seek feature on the 180GXP hard drives.
Since then, not much noise has been made by the
company. Below are images of the card and the
contents of its retail packaging:
The ZL-150 is a 4-port
SATA RAID controller. Like the Promise card,
this board also uses a 32-bit
PCI interface, up to 66MHz. It has a buzzer
and a stick 64MB of socketed cache memory on board. Like the
AMCC 3ware and Promise cards, the ZL-150 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 Pacific Digital website:
•
Support up to 2
SATA-1 drives on 2 Port 4 drives on 4 port model
• BIOS
Configuration Utility to Create and Delete RAID
• Install
O/S to RAID and Boot from RAID
• Works
with Windows 2000, Windows 2003, and Windows XP
•
Background rebuild without reboot
•
Controller Manager to configure and monitor RAID
volumes
• On-board
Automatic DMA state machine for true hardware
multi-tasking.
• Embedded
hardware queuing support for Serial ATA drives
• Operates
at maximum 32 bit speed in 33 or 66Mhz bus
• Scalable
performance with the highest throughput available on
SATA 150MBs drives
• Large
drive 48-bit LBA allows multiple peta-byte solutions
• PCI 2.2
compliant with advanced command set and power
management
The PDC RAID Manager
software allows users to configure the controller
from Windows:
Unfortunately, this
is as far as we can get with this product. We
tried reinstalling XP SP2 several times, different
motherboards, different CPUs, with or without SMP/hyperthreading,
and even tweaking the PCI latency and IRQ settings,
all to no avail. The system simply would not
go into Windows when the card is installed. It
would perpetually stay on the black Windows XP
loading screen with the scrolling bar.
Whatever the reason, it is simply counterintuitive
compared to other cards in this article.
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