I’ve been a big Promise fan since the original FastTrak (later renamed FastTrak33 to fit with the product line). At the time I had a bunch of 2 GB Western Digital hard drives that I didn’t know what to do with. The idea of using a RAID controller to make one big 8 GB ( wow, that’s big ) drive was fantastic. Of course there were some growing pains, but the card worked great. What’s even better is that I just requested a new BIOS chip for the card and it was sent for free; unfortunately Promise didn’t switch to a flash BIOS until the FastTrak66. But as usual I digress.

In the early days of ATA RAID controllers RAID 0, 1 and 0+1 was the limit of availability, thus relegating it to workstations and enthusiast machines. Of course SCSI RAID controllers allowed for so much more, but at an exorbitant prices which flew in the face of the entire ATA RAID concept. Adaptec was the first to release an ATA RAID 5 controller, the AAA-UDMA, which was a SCSI RAID card with a “translation” chip for IDE drives. It’s performance was adequate, but more importantly paved the way for Promise SuperTrak100, and the rest is history.

My focus has shifted to RAID 5 controllers, since they are perfect for entry level servers used in small to medium enterprises ( SME or SMB ). Today’s motherboards bundle RAID 0, 1 controllers onboard for a minimal charge, and Intel and VIA are now building them into their chipsets with the advent of serial ATA. Unlike these controllers, RAID 5 requires some hardware horsepower to calculate the parity bits and spread the data across the array. Onboard RAM is also a necessity, along with the CPU and ATA controllers bringing the complexity and cost of the product up. Imagine my surprise when I heard of the Promise FastTrak SX4000 RAID 5 controller selling for less than half of it’s competitors.

The SX4000 is a new step for Promise in a lot of ways. Their two previous RAID 5 cards, the SuperTrak100 and the SuperTrak SX6000, used Intel i960 processors along with three Promise ATA ASICs (Application Specific Integrated Circuit ). They were full length PCI cards with six IDE connections, one RAM slot and battery backup.

Let’s look at the SX4000. Cracking open the box we get the card, a quick start guide, a product manual, drivers and software on 3.5” floppy and CD-ROM, four 80 wire 40 ping ATA cables and two thick molex power “y” splitters. On to the card: it’s a mid length ( not small but not full length ) PCI card with four ATA connections. Bottom right is the 168 pin DIMM slot for SDRAM from 64 MB to 256 MB. A small speaker sits above. The only processor or ASIC onboard is the Promise PDC20621, which is described in the literature as an XOR engine. This single chip solution saves cost from the previous SuperTrak series, described above. On the faceplate are four red status lights; it’s interesting to note they’re not mentioned in any of the literature as to what they do. From the card layout you can also see what isn’t there: a spot for a battery backup in the bottom left and one can only guess what that space in the top right is for.

Installation was straightforward: plug the card into an available PCI slot, either 32 or 64 bit, 33 or 66 MHz. The SX4000 is a 66 MHz 32 bit PCI controller capable of 266 MB/s maximum. I installed an available 256 MB ECC DIMM in it’s single memory slot: you can use 64, 128 or a 256 MB DIMM. The case I’m using, and Antec SLK3700AMB, has three drive lights, so I connected one of them to the header on the SX4000. Hooked up the four drives and powered the system. The card is longer than most PCI adapters, but it isn’t full length either. I had to move one of my hard drives to accommodate it, but that was the only issue. For some reason all AMD 768 MP motherboards put the 64 bit 66MHz PCI slots in the middle of the board, instead of the bottom where most cases leave room.

Once the SX4000 initialized it prompted me to enter the BIOS and define an array. Here you can view, define, delete or repair an array. RAID levels 0, 1, 0+1, 5 and JBOD (just a bunch of disks) are supported. As well all these functions and more can be performed in the operating system via the Promise Array Management, or PAM in Windows and the Array Utility in Linux. That’s right, the SX4000 is supported in various Windows and Linux flavors. For this review Windows 2000 Server is used. The BIOS interface is dead easy, and arrays can be deleted and created with no delay or wait time.

Booting into Windows 2000 server I installed the drivers and rebooted. The SX4000 shows as a SCSI device in Device Manager, as do all ATA RAID controllers. The array shows under disk drives as a Promise Array. Installing the Promise Array Management utility was another non event, but a username and password has to be created for array management. Once installed PAM can be managed from any PC over the network by installing PAM wherever and selecting remote management. PAM is straightforward to use and allows for the gamut of options, including enabling write back cache. I didn’t find this aided performance, and the default is having it disabled. Changes to an array require a reboot, but it nice to make changes remotely and schedule a reboot without interacting with the machine.

Performance was excellent, in relation to the SX4000’s abilities and cost. Check the benchmarks and testbed for more information. Promise designed the card as a one chip solution, covering the ATA controllers, RAID calculation and the like. Check the cache size comparison to see what fits your needs; I anticipated better performance from more cache, but that’s not the case.

I’ve had this card for the better part of six months, trying to arrange competitors. It performed flawlessly across three platforms as I ran various benchmarks and changed my platform and software. I that time there were BIOS and driver revisions, which were implemented on this final benchmarking and platform.

As I went to format a RAID 5 array for the final PCMark2002 benchmark, I received an error that the format failed. I played around and ran diagnostics on all the drives individually, plus used them with other ATA RAID controllers without incident. I submitted an incident report via the Promise website, or tried to. For two days the form created SQL errors. On the third day it went through, but I didn’t receive a reply. I waited more than a week and didn’t hear back again. I’m sending an email with the same information this week and will post what happens. This is my first bad experience with Promise’s tech support, and I’m hoping it only a bug with their online reporting form.

I heartily recommend this card for users looking to utilize four or less drives in a RAID 5 array. It’s half the cost of the Adapter 2400A or 3ware 7500 series, even with the additional purchase of the required DIMM.

Update / Revision

May 30th 2003

After my email to tech support I received an answer three days later suggesting the problem lay with the DIMM I was using. Replacing it with an available 128 MB ECC PC133 DIMM seemed to do the trick.

August 9th 2003

Promise has released new drivers, BIOS and PAM for the SX4000. Included is a utility to test memory installed on the card. As well Windows Server 2003 drivers are included.

Editors note: this review was migrated from the old eBabble.net site and the photos updated. Originally published May 22nd 2003.

When one thinks of ATA RAID, the first name that comes to mind is Promise. The first company to mass market a controller for IDE drives continues the FastTrak line from the original to the 66 and 100 models, each accommodating a new generation of ATA specs.

Looking at the features offered, very little has changed between the three models other than the ATA spec supported. All three FastTrak’s support four disks in the following configurations: RAID 0, RAID 1 and RAID 0+1. The FastTrak100 supports JBOD ( just a bunch of disks ) which takes all disks connected and uses them contiguously. The 66 and 100 models support flashable BIOS, while the 33 model requires a new BIOS chip from Promise. To compare the three cards, FastTrak ( FastTrak33 for this review ), FastTrak66 and FastTrak100, I installed them in the RAID Projects test machine and benchmark criteria.

Everything from packaging to board layout has remained consistent, aside from a chip shuffle. Opening the box reveals the FastTrak series adapter, four IDE cables, a manual and a bunch of floppy disks. Looking at the image above shows the board layout, with the Promise controller chip and BIOS, along with two ATA connectors and a four pin LED connector. The original 33 model had two controller chips, a Promise PDC20247 and a PDC20246. The 66 and 100 models use one controller chip, the PDC 20262 and PDC20267 respectively. An interesting side note: the SuperTrak100 uses the PDC20265 while the FastTrak100 uses the PDC20267, yet they both are used to control ATA100 drives.

Installation and setup was straightforward with all models. Insert the card, hook up the drives and run the BIOS setup. Again basically the same screens across the line; either let the card configure itself through a simple menu selection or configure it yourself by choosing drives and RAID levels. Unlike the RAID 5 adapters previously reviewed, RAID setup cannot be configured in software and must be done through the cards setup at boot.

I should point out that I flashed the 66 and 100 models to BIOS version 1.30 build 12. Promise uses one unified driver and utility set for all cards, and maintains BIOS versions across the flashable models. For the 33 model I ordered the 1.06 BIOS two years ago, but to date it’s at version 1.08. I ordered it but didn’t receive in time for this review. The drivers uses were 1.30 build 42.

Driver and utility installation went smoothly in my Windows 2000 Professional testbed. The OS recognized the 33 and 66 models and installed default drivers. I upgraded them to 1.30 without problems. One interesting anomaly; after installing the 33 model I found the OS was seeing the hard drives as individual 20 GB drives, not as the RAID 0 four drive 80 GB array I set up.

The FastCheck utility allows for simple maintenance of your RAID arrays. Status screens shows the drive specs hooked to the adapter and what configuration used. An options page lets you set criteria such as event logging, PCI bus utilization, synch and rebuild settings for RAID 0 and 0+1 arrays. A fair number of options present, and the ability to schedule an array synchronization for late hours gives peace of mind.

The manual is well laid out with a thorough examination of all hardware and software options and settings. While not necessary, a good read gives one a complete knowledge of what Promise has delivered. I especially liked the RAID definitions and frequently asked questions provided. Very informative.

Benchmarks paint a promising picture ( ouch, bad pun ). Unfortunately it was at this point that my FastTrak66 gave up the ghost and wouldn’t work. I’ve tried everything and resorted to returning it for repair. Looking at the scores from the 33 and 100 models show very similar results, with the variance easily credited to the improved interface. While the ATA specs’ high end only come into play during some burst operations, there is a divide between 33 MB/s and 100 MB/s.

I’m a big fan of Promise’s line of products and heartily recommend the FastTrak series. Keep in mind a RAID 0 array won’t make loading Windows or playing games that much faster. RAID should be used for redundancy, backup or when there is a need for large disks.

Editors note: this review was migrated from the old eBabble.net site and the photos updated. Originally published January 29th 2001.

]]> http://tech.ebabble.net/promise-fasttrak/feed 1 http://tech.ebabble.net/promise-supertrak100 http://tech.ebabble.net/promise-supertrak100#comments Fri, 26 Jan 2007 19:24:29 +0000 Scott VanderPloeg http://www.ebabble.net/reviews/promise-supertrak100/

The second card in our ATA RAID project is the Promise SuperTrak100.  Promise has had a long standing relationship with ATA RAID in the form of their FastTrak line, which we’ll look at next week.  With the SuperTrak line Promise adds RAID 3 and 5 along with RAID 0, 1 and 0+1.  Two models are available; the SuperTrak66 which is an ATA66 card with a four drive capacity, and the SuperTrak100 which boasts ATA100 connectivity with a six drive capacity. Let’s examine the card from box to benchmarks.

Upon opening the Promise SuperTrak100 box you see it’s a full size PCI adapter, the same length as the Adaptec AAA-UDMA we looked at last week.  Also included are six 80 wire 40 pin single drive cables, two manuals and three 3.5” disks.  The adapter has six IDE channel connections, three Promise PDC20265 controller chips, an Intel i960RD CPU, a battery, an alarm, a 72 PIN SIMM slot with a 16 MB EDO SIMM, an LED connector and four LED’s along the backplane.

Promise has followed Adaptec’s lead again in the drive setup, with one drive per channel connection. This is to eliminate any waiting on each channel; with a traditional two drive channel setup only one drive communicates over the bus at a time.  The two items needed for a RAID 3 or 5 adapter are cache and a processor to handle the parity distribution.  The SuperTrak100 handles anywhere from 8 MB to 128 MB, but the 16 MB included is more than adequate.  The Intel i960 is an I2O ( intelligent I/O ) compliant processor that handles the parity information and allows for network management of the adapter. Some complex concepts that deserve a closer look, so make sure to check out those links.

Installation was straightforward and easy enough, but perusing the “Quick Installation Guide” walks through everything you need to do.  I connected four drives and entered the BIOS setup to see what was what; Promise refers to their BIOS setup as SuperBuild and their Windows setup as SuperCheck.  The standard Promise configuration allowed me to quickly setup my array as I’ve used FastTrak adapters. Once configured I rebooted and entered Windows 2000 and installed the drivers and SuperCheck suite.

SuperCheck consists of three parts: message server, message agent and monitoring utility.  Through these the SuperTrak100 can be configured and monitored locally or across the network, even over the internet.  All the important information that’s available with SCSI RAID controllers is present here, showing Promise’s commitment to giving a quality adapter that rivals any SCSI setup.  The adapter, drives, users and configurations are represented as icons for easy navigation and I had no trouble moving around. SuperCheck’s three components are installed as services: while the SuperTrak100 requires Windows 2000 or NT for installation, it can be monitored from any Windows 9x machine.  The user’s manual covers all aspects of setup and monitoring thoroughly, and is a good read.

Also part of the monitoring available is for Promise’s SuperSwap 5.25” removable drive housings.  These only work with Promise adapters and provide a solid removable solution for hot swapping which is supported by the SuperTrak100.  In fact it’s the only ATA RAID adapter to do so, but these housings don’t come cheap.  SuperCheck monitors cable, temperature and fan status allowing for a complete picture for a remote operator.  I’m trying a few out and will have an in depth review shortly.

The benchmarks show the SuperTrak100 to be a good performer all around and the fastest ATA RAID 5 adapter available.  It’s important to remember that RAID 5 is not used for performance but reliability and fault tolerance in a reasonably fast manner.  I am disappointed that RAID 0 scores are below those of the FastTrak100; it seems the cache and i960 processor are more a hindrance in this setup.

If you’re looking for an ATA RAID solution that handles levels 3 and 5, or need hot swap capability, or require remote monitoring, then the SuperTrak series is for you.  It’s got a lot going for it, but in a server environment.  If your concern is speed or redundancy via RAID 0 or 0+1, go with another adapter and save a few dollars.

Editors note: this review was migrated from the old eBabble.net site and the photos updated.  Originally published January 27th 2001.

After spending far too many nights benchmarking, let’s take a look at the first of three ATA RAID adapters. The Adaptec AAA-UDMA was the first RAID 5 adapter designed for ATA hard drives. RAID had been the domain of SCSI hard drives until 1995 when Promise released the FastTrak, a RAID 0, 1 and 0+1 ATA33 adapter. Since then quite a few companies, Promise, Highpoint and AMI to name a few, have released ATA RAID adapters in the same vein. It took a leader in SCSI to release the first RAID 5 adapter, and so Adaptec made the AAA-UDMA.

This leads us to the first problem: Adaptec is a SCSI company, and that’s what it knows. Therefore the AAA-UDMA is based on their line of SCSI RAID adapters, right down to the BIOS. In fact Adaptec has taken one of their RAID cards, added an ATA controller chip, and created the AAA-UDMA. The card translates SCSI commands to the ATA chip and in one stroke limits it’s ability to be a contender. Let’s take a step back and look at the whole picture.

Opening the box reveals a full length PCI adapter, two manuals, four drive cables, one CD and a slew of diskettes. If you’ve never worked with full length PCI cards, be prepared for a surprise; they run the entire case and take advantage of those slot brackets by the case fan you’ve never used. The AAA-UDMA is 12.28 inches long. Examining the card shows four IDE connectors and an IDE LED connector. There is a 168 pin DIMM slot with a 2 MB ECC EDO RAM DIMM installed; why they chose EDO over SDRAM I’ll never know, but I would have liked to try a 64MB SDRAM DIMM in there to see what’s what. I put a 64MB PC100 SDRAM DIMM on the card just to see, but it gave me an error of unrecognized DIMM. Of note as well are the controller chips: standard Adaptec AIC-7890AB and an AIC-7815G. These are used on Adaptec’s SCSI RAID controllers and a sure tip off that this is a SCSI design cobbled with IDE components. The UDMA translator is an Altera Flex, which is my first experience with this company and perusing the web site didn’t give me much insight. This card is over a year old and uses ATA66 connections, giving a maximum transfer rate per channel of 66 MB/s burst speed.

Installation was quick and easy: plug the card in and reboot. If you want to boot from the array and install an operating system, a configuration boot disk is provided for most network OS’s utilizing Adaptec’s ArrayConfig utility. I was using a single disk as the boot disk and the RAID array as separate storage, so once into Windows 2000 the hardware was detected and I used the diskette to load the drivers. Up and running.

I shut down, hooked up the drives and rebooted. Unlike other ATA RAID controllers, going into the card’s BIOS doesn’t let you configure anything. It’s Adaptec’s standard SCSI BIOS and let’s you low level format the drives, but that’s about it for ATA drives.

All drive, adapter and array configuration and management is done through software, namely Adaptec CI/O Management. This package is installed from the single CD and has a thick manual dedicated to it. CI/O is used manage all Adaptec arrays, ATA or SCSI, and is easy to work with. The software serves two main functions: to set up arrays and to monitor all related equipment, locally or remotely via a client PC on the network.

Once I had everything installed I selected set up my first array, a four disk RAID 0 configuration. CI/O walked me through the process and led me to the last step: initialization. This took over four hours for most configurations using four 20 GB Maxtor drives; better safe than sorry.

Quite a few options are presented for RAID configurations: RAID 0, 1, 0+1, 5 with block sizes in kilobytes of 8, 16, 32, 64 and 128. 64 is the default setting, as it is with all ATA RAID adapters I’ve looked at. As well you can have just disks connected to the card, but it would be a lot cheaper to buy a Promise Ultra adapter if you were just looking to add two more IDE channels.

Adaptec CI/O Management is designed for just that. All aspects of the array, drives and controller are monitored and reported through CI/O or NT’s Event Viewer. I found my way around without consulting the manual and was able to accomplish most tasks easily. Everything is well laid out and logical; a minor problem was that each task opened a new window within the software. Remote management is done by installing the CI/O software and pointing it to the Adaptec array; performance over the network was good and I managed everything the same as on the machine with the card installed.

Consulting the manual showed the full depth of features developed by Adaptec for their SCSI RAID controllers, pointing out time and time again that advanced features weren’t available for the AAA-UDMA. I recommend reading through everything before deploying in a production machine, but that’s safe advice for any hardware upgrade.
Consulting the benchmarks show what a few other reviewers have discovered: this card isn’t built for speed. Adaptec bills the AAA-UDMA on their RAID site as a “sub-entry server” model. Apparently that’s reliable but slow.

To wrap it all up, I would have to recommend that most users pass on this model. If you need ATA RAID 5, go for the Promise SuperTrak line. If your environment is using Adaptec SCSI RAID controllers and CI/O Management, then the AAA-UDMA would fit right in.

Editors note: this review was migrated from the old eBabble.net site and the photos updated. Originally published January 10th 2001.

The world of ATA RAID is a small one. When I first became interested there were two players: Promise and Highpoint. Slowly I began to hear of 3ware, a company that produced great products, but at a high price. At that time RAID 0 and 1 were about it, and then Promise released the SuperTrak100 and Adaptec released the AAA-UDMA, both touting RAID 5. At that time 3ware released a BIOS and driver update for their Escalade 6000 series that added RAID 5. Of course there was no onboard RAM cache, so performance was lackluster. Then with the second wave of ATA RAID 5 3ware released the Escalade 7000 series and things looked up. We’re looking at the Escalade 7500-8, an ATA RAID controller capable of handling 8 drives in RAID 0,1,5,10 and JBOD ( just a bunch of disks ) in a Windows 2000 environment.

Escalade® 7500 Series

• Supports up to 12 drives with a single PCI card enabling up to 3terabytes of storage
• Ultra ATA/100 interface
• StorSwitch point-to-point non-blocking architecture
• PCI 2.2 compliant 64-bit/33MHz bus master¹
• RAID 0, 1, 10, 5 and JBOD support²
• Highest performance ATA RAID Controller
• On-board processor to provide true hardware-based RAID
• Bootable array support for greater fault tolerance
• BIOS set up utility and 3ware Disk Manager (3DM®) web-based management software
• Hot-swap and hot-spare capability
• Windows® and Linux® operating systems support

Opening the box revealed: the card, eight 18” ATA 80 wire 40 pin cables, a manual, a driver revision printout, a software envelope containing driver disks and a CD, and four molex “Y” power splitters. I read through the manual to get a feel for the product: it’s a thin photocopy that covers the basics. The manual covers the Escalade 6000 and 7000 series, so the photos in the manual are of 6000 series cards. What I found odd was that the 7.4 driver revision notes were thicker than the manual. Even so, the manual was straight forward and easy going for anyone with RAID experience.

Looking at the actual Escalade 7500-8 adapter, it’s layout is simple and effective. A central 3ware 200-0017-00 chip for RAID calculations and their own StorSwitch technology, two 3ware 200-0033-00 chips to each handle four ATA133 ports. Unfortunately there’s no information regarding individual ASICs on the 3ware website. Two 150 MHz 0.9 MB IDT memory chips for a total of 1.8 MB onboard cache, although I’ve read it online as 2 MB cache available. A few other chips on the board I was unable to identify, plus a four pin LED connector. The board is compact, reasonably short and well laid out.

Installation was straight forward: connected the drives, inserted the card and booted. the Escalade series are 64 bit 33 MHz PCI adapters, allowing for a maximum of 266 MB/sec transfers. Installed the drivers, rebooted and installed 3DM, 3ware Disk Management Utility for Windows. Creating, deleting and repairing RAID arrays is done via the card’s BIOS at boot up, and employs a simple and easy to understand interface. Creating RAID 0, 1 and 10 arrays was immediate: creating RAID 5 arrays took some time as X’s are written to test. This is good feature but takes some time. While it was inconvenient for testing and benchmarking, users should see this as a nice safety feature. As with all RAID products, the Escalade 7500-8 showed as a SCSI controller in Device Manager, and arrays show under disk drives.

Monitoring and reporting is handled via 3DM. This runs as a web server, so access is through your browser and accessed locally or over your network. Again, easy to use and straight forward. Linux users have the CLI, or 3ware Command Line Interface.

In the box I received driver version 7.4, which I installed and began to benchmark with. After a few weeks the board stopped working, so I took advantage of 3ware’s technical support. The system hung at the Escalade 7500-8’s BIOS and wouldn’t go any further. First you register your product online and create a profile, then submit a problem report. Within a day I received an RMA for the board, and since I selected cross shipment by providing my credit card, I received a replacement board within a week. Very nice and smooth technical support.

This time the box contained the 7.53 drivers. I began benchmarking with these, the latest drivers. Performance was ho hum and nothing special. Following Storage Review’s forums on 3ware products revealed users resorting to registry hacks and changing disks from basic to dynamic to get better performance. Then a posting revealed a new driver revision, 7.6, that gave a real performance boost without the “voodoo” tweaking. Redid all benchmarks with the 7.6 driver, firmware and 3DM releases. Doing this revealed the product forces you to update all three items, another nice feature to keep things as 3ware wants it.

Benchmarks don’t lie: the 3ware Escalade 7500-8 with the 7.6 drivers dominated all tests save WinBench99 RAID 5. Sometimes it’s a close call with the FastTrak SX4000, other times a huge margin.

Recommendations are easy: 3ware products give the best ATA RAID performance. If you need to use 8 or 12 drives, they’re the only player in town. The Escalade 7500-4LP is a four drive low profile adapter and fits just about anywhere, another great plus. The only concern is cost: expect to pay 50-100% more for 3ware cards compared to Promise’s FastTrak SX4000. In this case you get what you pay for: the best performance for the highest price.

Editors note: this review was migrated from the old eBabble.net site and the photos updated. Originally published May 30th 2003.

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