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System BIOS, Fasttrak's and large disks
A quick synopsis of info from another thread;
1. Your mainboards BIOS determines how large a hard drive you can add to the internal controller. This can be as small a 8 gigs or as large as 128 gigs with the current int13h extensions.
2. The Promise Ultra and Fasttrak cards both support the full 128 gig disk size even if your system BIOS does not. This means that the only remaining limits are those imposed by your OS or filesystem.
3. The Fasttrak's have a further advantage: their limit is imposed on a per-disk basis. This means that if you have 4 drives in a single RAID array the size limit is 4 x 128 or 512 gigs. Promise has tested the newer cards with a 300 gig array using four 75 gig IBM GXP75's, but will not support such large arrays.
4. Promise plans on supporting new int13h extensions as they are defined. IF, for example, such an extension allowed for a 2 terabyte drive and one were actually produced a 4 drive array could theoretically be as large as 8 terabytes. The utility of this large a volume again would fall upon the OS and filesystem limitations.
5. Such a large/fast array may well overrun the 133 mb/s bandwidth of the current PCI/33 32 bit bus. This will not be so much of a problem with the new PCI/66 64 bit bus which has a 256 mb/s bandwidth. New mainboards are coming with this spec. The Asus CUR-DLS is such a board. It has two PCI/66 64 bit slots and 5 PCI/33 32 bit slots.
6. Promise is coming out in Feb/Mar 2001 with a PCI/66 64 bit version of the Fasttrak100 which also has 4 channels instead of 2. Each drive on this card will be treated as a master drive. No master/slave relationships to slow down 3 or 4 drive arrays, which is a problem with the current Fasttraks.
7. The Promise SuperTrak100 takes this a step or two further. It is a 6 channel card for WinNT/Win2K that can do RAID 0, 1, 3, 5 and spanned arrays.
Dr. Mordrid
[This message has been edited by Dr Mordrid (edited 06 December 2000).]
1. Your mainboards BIOS determines how large a hard drive you can add to the internal controller. This can be as small a 8 gigs or as large as 128 gigs with the current int13h extensions.
2. The Promise Ultra and Fasttrak cards both support the full 128 gig disk size even if your system BIOS does not. This means that the only remaining limits are those imposed by your OS or filesystem.
3. The Fasttrak's have a further advantage: their limit is imposed on a per-disk basis. This means that if you have 4 drives in a single RAID array the size limit is 4 x 128 or 512 gigs. Promise has tested the newer cards with a 300 gig array using four 75 gig IBM GXP75's, but will not support such large arrays.
4. Promise plans on supporting new int13h extensions as they are defined. IF, for example, such an extension allowed for a 2 terabyte drive and one were actually produced a 4 drive array could theoretically be as large as 8 terabytes. The utility of this large a volume again would fall upon the OS and filesystem limitations.
5. Such a large/fast array may well overrun the 133 mb/s bandwidth of the current PCI/33 32 bit bus. This will not be so much of a problem with the new PCI/66 64 bit bus which has a 256 mb/s bandwidth. New mainboards are coming with this spec. The Asus CUR-DLS is such a board. It has two PCI/66 64 bit slots and 5 PCI/33 32 bit slots.
6. Promise is coming out in Feb/Mar 2001 with a PCI/66 64 bit version of the Fasttrak100 which also has 4 channels instead of 2. Each drive on this card will be treated as a master drive. No master/slave relationships to slow down 3 or 4 drive arrays, which is a problem with the current Fasttraks.
7. The Promise SuperTrak100 takes this a step or two further. It is a 6 channel card for WinNT/Win2K that can do RAID 0, 1, 3, 5 and spanned arrays.
Dr. Mordrid
[This message has been edited by Dr Mordrid (edited 06 December 2000).]