Promise IDE RAID controller

[CHHAS]

I'm think 'bout buying, does anyone have words of caution or joy ?

[Sir Hitech]

CHHAS:

I have the Promise FastTrack66 and it works very nicely in my Athlon system with Win98SE and was working flawlessly in my Dual PII333 running NT. It currently stripes four UDMA66 27gb 7200rpm Maxtor drives to form two virtual drives of 54gb each channel (I can go 108gb if I put all four on one channel). Windows98 can only recognize hd max size of 64gb thats why I have to split them up. NT can recognize 128gb max.

Windows sees and treats the FastTrack as a SCSI device. From my experience, the striped drives are best used as datadrives not boot drives due to slower seek time(others might disagree with me). They really shorten the file transfer time by half or two thirds over a stand alone drive because of the wider bandwidth.

If used as mirroring hd system, it just works in the background without any user intervention. Bottom line: no more swapping backup tapes every night.. If one hd went out of commision, you just replace that bad hd and you are back in business without loosing a byte of data.

The prices of IDE hd's are so much lower than the SCSI ones, it make sense to use IDE RAID. Just my two dollars...

[ObiBen]

HiTech....your system must kick ass! Just a question.....does the IDE RAID controller you have send your CPU usage throught the roof? I have an ol' dual P2-300 setup with U2W SCSI, and the CPU usage has never gone up higher than 22% when accessing the HD, CD, and Burner in a variety of tasks. I love SCSI, but the costs can be scary when you compare SCSI devices to IDE devices. I'd like to eventually go to a raid-type setup, and I'll definitely take a look into IDE RAID.

ThanX.


------------------
Regards,

Ben

Config: AOPen AX6BC Pro II Millenium Edition, P2 400@500, 128MB PC133 RAM, SB Live!, Netgear 10/100, Adapted 2940U2W SCSI adapter, Seagate Barracuda 4.3GB UW, Quantum Atlas III 9.1GB U2W, Yamaha 4416S writer, Pioneer 36X SCSI CD reader, STB Blackmagic V2 (SLI) - removed after new TurboGL, Matrox G400MAX, Viewsonic PS790 and G773, Win98SE

[Sir Hitech]

Hey, Ben:

There is no performance hit on the CPU that I known of. The Raid works in the background just like the built-in UDMA33/66 controller in the computer. I can do a cd burn, file transfers, PhotoShop processing, browse the net, and crunch some data with MS Access at the same time and nothing would slow down. Of course 256mb of ram helps too..

IDE has come a long way. Its not just a lot cheaper but also runs neck to neck with SCSI Hd's when comes to performance and stability. Company I work for operates about 75 NT servers and 2/3 runs on Fastrack66 and IDE hd's. There might be some issues with the Fasttrack66, I just don't see any... Go for it.

[elmes]

If you use striping, do the physical drives have to be the same size? Could I have say a 22GB and a 34GB drive treated as one 66GB?
If you add a second HD and this controller, do you need to re-install Windows or does it just statrt working (ie. wouldn't boot time be quicker if Windows was installed striped on both drives)?

[xortam]

I can confirm what Mark F says. The drives should all have similar performance metrics as well (RPM, seek, etc.) You're best off using identical drives if you want the highest performance and efficiency.

You need to reformat your volume(s) any time you stripe or modify the striping block size of a RAID array.

------------------

• ASUS P2B-S, PIII 450MHz, Award ACPI BIOS v1010, 128 MB RAM
• MYLEX FlashPoint RAID+ (BIOS v2.02N) running RAID 0 on two 9 GB IBM DDRS 39130D Disks
• Diamond MX300 sound card, now with MX25 S/PDIF output
• Matrox Millennium G400 Max Dual Head - English
• NEC 5FG monitor
• YAMAHA CRW4416S and NEC Multispin 3x CDs
• 3Com Fast EtherLink XL 10/100Mb TX NIC (3C905B-TX)
• US Robotics 56K Voice FaxModem Pro
• Pioneer DVD-303S SCSI
• Note--All SCSI devices (except disk drives on RAID) are connected to onboard AIC7890 U2W SCSI
• Mainly running Win98 v4.10.1998

[This message has been edited by xortam (edited 15 February 2000).]

[Taz]

Just in case you are interested Iwill now make a similar product, the info can be sound at
http://www.iwill.net/products/Spec.a...D66&SupportID=

[High_Jumbllama]

Umm, I think youy meant 56GB.

Anyway the drives have to be the same size and type as well I believe.

[Mark F]

You will get a 44MB drive. The smaller size is used to deturmine. Large drive is waisted.

Mark F.

------------------
OH NO, my retractable cup holder swallowed a CD