Introduction; What Is The Fasttrak/Fasttrak66 Raid Card - Promise Technology FASTTRAK66 User Manual

Manual EN 05-08-1999 11:30 Pagina 5
Chapter 1

Introduction

Congratulations on choosing Promise Technology's innovative FastTrak66
Ultra ATA/66 RAID card for IBM PC compatible systems. This card is
designed to boost sustained transfer rates and/or provide fault tolerance for the
latest Ultra ATA/66 hard drives, while being backward-compatible with Ultra
ATA/33, Enhanced IDE, and Fast ATA-2 high performance hard disk drives.
What is the FastTrak66 RAID Card?
Promise designed its FastTrak66 card to provide a cost-effective, high perfor-
mance RAID card that adds performance and/or reliability to PC desktops
and/or servers using Ultra ATA/66, Ultra ATA/33, or EIDE drives.
FastTrak66 supports striping (RAID 0), mirroring (RAID 1), striping/-
mirroring (RAID 0+1), or spanning (JBOD) operation , respectively. With
striping, identical drives can read and write data in parallel to increase perfor-
mance. Mirroring increases read performance through load balancing and
elevator sorting while creating a complete backup of your files. Striping with
mirroring offers both high read/write performance and error tolerance.
Spanning uses the full capacity of all attached drives without requiring
identical drive size, but offers no other RAID functionality.
A FastTrak66 striped array can double the sustained data transfer rate of Ultra
ATA/66 drives. FastTrak66 fully supports Ultra ATA/66 specification of up to
66 MB/sec per drive, depending on individual drive specifications.
FastTrak66 also offers fault tolerant, data redundancy for entry-level network
file servers or simply for desktop PC users wanting to continually protect
valuable data on their PC. FastTrak66 offers RAID 1 mirroring (for two drives)
and RAID 0+1 mirroring and striping (for four drives) to protect data. Should
a drive that is part of a mirrored array fail, FastTrak66 uses the mirrored drive
(which contains identical data) to assume all data handling. When a new
replacement drive is later installed, FastTrak66 rebuilds data to the new drive
from the mirrored drive to restore fault tolerance.
FastTrak66's bootable BIOS supports individual drives larger than 8.4GB.
With FAT32 and NTFS partitioning, the array can be addressed as one large
single volume.
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