Supero SUPER P3TDDE, User Manual

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5-1
Chapter 5: FastTrak 100 RAID Controller
Chapter 5
IDE RAID Controller
5-1 Introduction to the FastTrak 100 RAID Controller
The P3TDDE contains a Promise Technology FastTrak100 RAID controller installed
onboard. Promise designed the FastTrak100 PDC20267 to provide a cost-effective,
high performance RAID controller that adds performance and/or reliability to PC
desktops and servers using Ultra ATA/100, Ultra ATA/66 or EIDE drives.
FastTrak100 supports striping (RAID 0), mirroring (RAID 1), striping/mirroring (RAID
0+1) or spanning (JBOD) operations. 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 error
tolerance. Spanning uses the full capacity of all attached drives without requiring
identical drive sizes, but offers no other RAID functionality.
A FastTrak100 striped array can double the sustained data transfer rate of Ultra ATA/
66 drives. FastTrak100 fully supports Ultra ATA/100 specification of up to 100 MB/
sec per drive, depending upon individual drive specifications.
FastTrak100 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. FastTrak100 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, FastTrak100 uses the mirrored drive (which contains identical
data) to assume all data handling. When a new replacement drive is later installed,
FastTrak100 rebuilds data to the new drive from the mirrored drive to restore fault
tolerance.
FastTrak100’s bootable BIOS supports individual drives larger than 8.4 GB. With
FAT32 and NTFS partitioning, the array can be addressed as one large single volume.