SATA RAID

SATA RAID seems to be the rage these days. Practically all motherboard manufacturers have at least a few motherboards with SATA RAID features built-in. With RAID support built into most motherboards and hard disk drive prices continuously dropping, more and more people are opting for RAID solutions as a cheap way to improve performance and/or reliability.

Today, we are going to take a look at how you can optimize your SATA RAID solution. For this purpose, we are going to use Promise Technology's FastTrak100 ATA-RAID card. So, before we start with the checking out the optimal settings, let's take a look at Promise Technology and what the fuss about RAID is all about!

Promise Technology

Well, who else can be better at introducing Promise Technology Inc. other than Promise themselves? So, here is an excerpt from their website :

With more than 16 years of hardware engineering experience, Promise Technology continues to create breakthroughs in the ATA storage industry for application environments unheard of just a few years ago. RAID protection for today's small office/home office user. Faster data transfers for home users and professional workstations. Increased value and advanced network storage for large networks.

Promise is the Industry-recognized leader in the ATA RAID market, having single-handedly established the product category three years ago. In 1999, the company achieved 90 percent unit market share in the host-based Ultra-DMA RAID controller market.' With offices in San Jose, Taiwan, Europe, and China, Promise Technology, Inc. uses worldwide resources to continue the strong Promise heritage of innovation.

Consumer RAID Solutions

Most RAID controllers found in desktop motherboards usually support only RAID 0, RAID 1, RAID 0+1 and JBOD (Just a Bunch Of Disks). There are also a few RAID controllers that support RAID 5 but they are not really that common.

Before we can test the performance of each RAID level, let's dwell a little on the subject of RAID and understand how it actually works. We will cover the more common RAID 0, RAID 1, RAID 0+1, RAID 5 and JBOD.

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