Blast from the past: originally published in 2003.

Testing RAID cards is a long and arduous process. The most difficult part was deciding on a standard cluster size for all cards. While the Promise cards can have from 8k to 2048k, Adaptec’s limit is 128k, and 3ware’s is 64k. All cards default to 64k cluster size, so who am I to argue? Just for comparison sake, I ran the Promise FastTrak100 with three cluster sizes to see the difference.

Blast from the past: originally published in 2003.

Cache plays an integral part in RAID types that use parity or error checking and correcting (ECC). How much cache to put on a RAID card to get the best performance is a tricky bit of business: the natural reaction is to max it out. Below is a comparison of benchmarks using three sizes: 64, 128 and 256 MB PC133 SDRAM on a Promise FastTrak SX4000 with IBM DeskStar 75GXP 20 GB drives.

The BC4000 RAID HBA family, comprised of 64-bit, PCI-X low-profile compliant controller cards, are the only 2U compatible SATA RAID controller cards available today. The product family provides both four-drive (BCM4452-H) or eight-drive (BCM4852-H) support and are based on Broadcom’s new BCM5770 Serial ATA controller chip. The new Broadcom BCM5770 SATA chip and the BC4000 controller card significantly boost reliability with efficient power consumption and thermal load balancing, and feature a MTBF (mean time between failures) of 3.5 million hours, which is nearly three times greater than that of competitive …

FastTrak S150 SX4

Four-port Serial ATA RAID controller with 1.5Gbps per channel
32-Bit/66MHz PCI 2.2 interface
Support for RAID level 0, 1, 10, 5 and JBOD
Online array expansion and RAID level migration to add capacity on the fly
Supports hot swap of failed drives
Automatic/manual rebuild of hot spare drive
PerfectRAID technology for robust error handling and recovery of fatal, media and disk errors
Variable stripe block size support enables optimization for diverse application requirements
Supports up to 256MB of SDRAM memory
Seamless upgrade to Promise’s external storage solutions

Promise controllers and I are old friends, all the way back …

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’s been a few weeks since my last eWeakly, simply for the fact that I haven’t done anything computer related of interest.
Last week Microsoft released the Windows Home Server Community Technology Preview (CTP).  This put a lot more fit and finish to the product.  I used the upgrade option to upgrade my existing WHS beta 2 installation.  Things went well, but I was still getting a failing service and couldn’t install the client software.  I had hoped the upgrade would resolve these two issues.
Around the same time I realized my …

The great server upgrade took place this weekend, or to be more accurate is still taking place.  I had a lot of spare parts at home and had already built the server.  As I started to remove files from the existing server one of the three Samsung 160 GB SATA drives failed and my RAID 5 array started limping in degraded mode.
But that’s alright, as I had a spare server already set up.  A Tyan 2882-D motherboard, two Opteron 246 CPUs, four 1 GB PC2100 DDR ECC RAM, 3ware Escalade 9550SX …

My APC UPS problems continue ( see last week for more details ) with random reboots.  I don’t believe the battery is working at all right now.  I have a brand new APC Smart UPS 1500 Rackmount in the garage, but I’ve been hoping to sell it instead of absorbing it into the household tech.  Guess it will be pressed into service.
I posted a review of the Promise SATA300 TX4 but needed a high quality pic.  There’s a tiny picture on the Promise website but when you click “Enlarge Image” …

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 …

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 …

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 …

Escalade® 8506 Series

Supports up to 12 drives with a single PCI card enabling up to 3terabytes of storage (dependent on drive capacity , 2TB per array maximum)
Supports ATA / 133 / 100 drives with a Parallel-to-Serial Drive Converter
StorSwitch point-to-point non-blocking architecture
PCI 2.2 compliant 64-bit / 66MHz bus master
RAID 0, 1, 10, 5 and JBOD support (2-port cotrollers support RAID 0,1 and JBOD)
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® …

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 …

This is not so much a review but a cautionary tale. Let me begin by saying I’ve been a longtime supporter (and purchaser) of Maxtor drives. They’ve had a few bumps in the road but I stick with them.
Just after Christmas the Maxtor Maxline Pro 500 GB drives were going on sale online. It makes sense that Seagate would be clearing them out and they’re the only drive really left available in Maxtor’s high end line that wasn’t SCSI. I’m building a new server to test …