Promise Technology S150 Chapter 5: Disk Array Concepts

Chapter 5: Disk Array Concepts

FastTrak S150 TX4 is a high performance Serial ATA/Ultra ATA RAID controller

card that features concurrent data channel operation and onboard BIOS. The

channels on the FastTrak S150 TX4 support concurrent operation that allows for

overlapped I/O under multi-tasking operating systems and sharing the workload

between multiple drives.

The FastTrak S150 TX4 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. When

the FastTrak S150 TX4 BIOS appears during bootup, press Ctrl-F to enter the

FastBuild setup to select from menu settings.

This setup utility is used to build and manage FastTrak S150 TX4 disk arrays.

The utility is menu driven and features the Auto Setup (1) 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 3,

which 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 reserve 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 FastTrak S150 TX4 connectors or cards within

the system without reconfiguring or rebuilding.