Promise FastTrack TX4 review!

PC Hardware posted for the first time on the web a review of the new Promise FastTrack TX4. This is the new four channels UDMA100 RAID controller from Promise which features two PDC20270 controllers and an Intel 21150 PCI Bridge. The controller is very fast due to its ability to work with four drives in RAID 0 mode on different IDE channels. The fault tolerant operation is also improved because it allows the use of spare drives in the system. We tested the four devices RAID 0 and RAID 0+1 in Windows 2000 SP2. Take a quote:

"The 21150 PCI Bridge is able to create another PCI bus on the card and a maximum of nine devices can be attached to this secondary PCI bus. The 21150 allows the two bridged PCI buses to operate concurrently. On the same PCI bus a master and a target can communicate while the other PCI bus is busy. In TX4 this means that the two PDC20270 controllers are linked using a secondary PCI bus and can operate while the primary PCI bus is busy. This greatly increases performance because otherwise the two controllers had to use the onboard PCI bus which could have been busy."

Review URL:

http://www.pchardware.ro/Reviews/review.php?id=131