Introduction; Key Features And Benefits - Promise Technology FastTRAK66 User Manual

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 FastT rak66 RAID Card?
Promise designed its FastTrak66 card to provide a cost-effective, high performance
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 performance. 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 perfor-
mance 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 vol-
ume.

Key Features and Benefits

The following information offers an overview of the major features of your new
Promise FastTrak. It is divided into two areas: Advanced Hardware Design, and
Compatibility.
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