Promise Technology FASTtrak100 TX User Manual page 6

FastTrak100 TX/LP™ Series User Manual
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 fault tolerance. Spanning uses the full capacity of all attached drives without
requiring identical drive size, but offers no other RAID functionality.
A FastTrak100 striped array can double (TX2 and LP models using two drives) or
quadruple (TX4 model using four drives) the sustained data transfer rate of Ultra
ATA/100 drives. FastTrak100 fully supports Ultra ATA/100 specification of up to 100
MB/sec per drive, depending on individual drive specifications.
All FastTrak100 models also offer fault tolerant, data redundancy f o r entry-level
network file servers or simply for desktop PC users wanting to continually protect
valuable data on their PC. Each FastTrak100 model offers RAID 1 mirroring (for two
drives) and RAID 0+1 mirroring plus striping (for four drives) to protect data. Should a
drive that is part of a mirrored array fail, FastTrak100 uses the mirrored drive (which
contains identical data) to assume all data handling. When a new replacement drive
is later installed, FastTrak100 rebuilds data to the new drive from the mirrored drive to
restore fault tolerance.
When attached drives are used with optional Promise SuperSwap(tm) "hot" swap
chassises, the FastTrak100 models allow replacing a failed drive without shutting
down the PC operation under RAID 1 mirroring. Because of its four independent data
channels, the FastTrak100 TX4 also supports "hot" swapping under RAID 0+1 using
four drives.
FastTrak100'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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