FastTrak S150 SX4 adapter provided courtesy of Promise Technologies.
I’ve recycled these images from the SX4000 review since PAM hasn’t changed.
Management of the S150 SX4 is handled via the Promise Array Management, or PAM. This utility has been around for some time, but is updated for every generation of Promise cards. It’s very clean the menus follow a nice flow. IT has the usual features: array build, monitoring and SMART support, email and pager notification. It’s standout feature in my opinion is array expansion and conversion, covered on pages 67 -73 of the PAM user manual. This allows an array to be expanded by adding more disks, or converted to another RAID level. Some caveats of course, but it works and works well. I added a fourth disk to a RAID 5 array. It was time consuming but worthwhile. Once completed it’s best to use a partition management package to resize the partition and get the benefit of the extra space. This functionality screams out for a controller that can handle more than four drives: when will Promise match 3ware’s eight and twelve drive controllers?
Performance has been increased substantially to match the 3ware Escalade 8506, judging by our extensive benchmarks. While the previous Promise SX4000 trailed the 3ware Escalade 7500 across the board, now we see a neck and neck race. Promise pulls ahead of the competition in price: the FastTrak S150 SX4 can be found for almost half of the 3ware Escalade 8506-4, it’s direct competitor. Where it falls short is drive capacity and PCB size: let’s see some 12 port SATA controllers in a low profile PCI-X packaging. If four drives are all you need, the Promise FastTrak S150 SX4 is the SATA controller for you.
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
