Today X-BitLabs takes a look at a new four-channel ATA/133 RAID controller from Promise, which proved a very reliable, well-done product. Are you sure you want to go for the brand new SATA stuff? Maybe it is worth paying attention to some excellent ATA/133 solutions which have already stood the test of time and still retained their actuality?
- The stir around SerialATA interface has reached its peak this summer: a lot of freshly released hard disk drives and controllers with SerialATA support occupied our minds (and testbeds) for a long time. However, I found a way out of this “vicious” circle (for a short while) and returned to reviewed of more popular ATA RAID controllers. Why I said more popular? I said so because ATA drives are still much cheaper than SATA ones and do not yield that much in performance to the newcomers.
We will start our new tour of RAID controller investigations with Promise FastTRAK TX 4000. According to its features, this controller is positioned inbetween the dual-channel FastTRAK TX2000 and a powerful four-channel SX4000. Even though you can also connect four HDDs to the TX2000 controller, our experience shows that four-channel controllers are always faster than their dual-channel counterparts when working with RAID arrays of three or four hard disk drives (see our article called Four-Channel ATA RAID Controllers Comparison for more details). The SX4000 controller with its four channels belongs to a different weight category compared with TX4000, because SX4000 features a XOR processor onboard and hence can support hardware RAID 5 arrays.
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