Understanding Disk Array Concepts; Disk Array Adapter; Adapter Bios; Reserved Sector - Promise Technology FastTRAK66 User Manual

Ultra ata/66 raid card

Hide thumbs Also See for FastTRAK66:

Table of Contents

Chapter 6

Understanding Disk Array Concepts

FastTrak66 is a high performance Ultra ATA/EIDE RAID controller card that

features parallel data channel operation and an onboard BIOS. The two channels

on the FastTrak66 support parallel operation that allows for overlapped I/O under

multi-tasking operating systems and sharing the workload between multiple drives.

The FastTrak66 card contains a BIOS code that extends the standard disk service

routine provided through Int13. The BIOS is bootable for DOS and other operating

systems that rely on the system BIOS for drive operation. FastTrak66 can support

drives and disk arrays with capacities exceeding 8.4 GB using Extended Interrupt13

support. When the FastTrak66 BIOS appears during bootup, users can press <F2>

to enter the FastBuild

setup to select from menu settings.

FastBuild

Auto Menu Setup

This setup utility is used to build and manage FastTrak66 disk arrays. The utility is

menu driven and features the <1> Auto Setup option that uses a simple, interactive

setup process. Once the array is built, all the array members store the configuration

information in the drive's reserved area.

See Chapter 4 that provides descriptions of individual functions.

Array configuration data about the drive member and other members in the disk

array are saved on a special location on the disk drives called the reserved sector. If

any member of the array becomes corrupt or lost, the redundant configuration data

on the other members can be used for rebuilds.

Disk array members do not have a "memory" of their drive positions. This allows

drives to be placed on different FastTrak66 connectors or cards within the system

without reconfiguring or rebuilding.

6-1

Table of Contents