Promise Technology user manual Introduction, What is the FastTrak TX4000 RAID Card?

Chapter 1: Introduction

The PC which you are using either already contains a Promise Technology FastTrak TX4000 RAID card installed by a third-party or you have acquired a FastTrak TX4000 retail product for your existing PC and will be installing the card yourself.

•For PC owners wishing to install their Promise Technology FastTrak TX4000 card, proceed to Chapter 2: Quick Start on page 5.

•For PCs with a Promise Technology FastTrak TX4000 card already installed, consult Chapter 6: Troubleshooting and Tips on page 51 if you are experiencing any difficulties with the hard drive being recognized by the card.

•If your operating system has crashed for some reason or you have downloaded updated drivers from the Promise website (www.promise.com), you may wish to reinstall software drivers for the FastTrak TX4000 card. Consult Chapter 4: Installing Drivers on page 33.

What is the FastTrak TX4000 RAID Card?

Promise originally designed the FastTrak TX4000 card as a cost-effective, high performance RAID card that adds performance and/or reliability to PC desktops and/or servers using Ultra ATA/133, Ultra ATA/100, or Ultra ATA/66 drives. The FastTrak TX4000 offer some major performance differences as described below.

The FastTrak TX4000 supports motherboards that offer a 66MHz PCI bus (versus the traditional 33MHz bus) and the capability of transferring data across the PCI bus at speeds up to 266MB per second (versus the previous 133MB per second). As Ultra ATA/133 drive performance continues to improve, the use of the Promise ATA RAID card in a 66 MHz PCI slot will allow data transfers to exceed the older 33MB. Of course, the FastTrak TX4000 is backward compatible with standard 33MHz PCI slots.

FastTrak TX4000 has four independent data channels to support a maximum of four Ultra ATA drives. FastTrak TX4000 supports striping (RAID 0), mirroring (RAID 1) or striping/mirroring (RAID 0+1).

•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 performance and fault tolerance.

A FastTrak TX4000 striped array can double the sustained data transfer rate of Ultra ATA/133 drives. FastTrak TX4000 fully supports Ultra ATA/133 specification of up to 133 MB/sec per drive, depending on individual drive specifications.

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