Promise Technology FAST TRAK100TM - Manual (Page 5)

FastTrak100 User Manual
1
Introduction
Thank you for your recent purchase.The PC which you are using either already
contains a Promise Technology

FastTrak100 RAID card installed by a third-party
or you have acquired a FastTrak100 retail box for your existing PC and will be
installing the card yourself.
For PC owners wishing to install their Promise Technology

FastTrak100, proceed
to the Getting Started section (see page 6).
For PCs with a Promise Technology

FastTrak100 card already installed, consult
the Troubleshooting section of the manual (see page 71) 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 FastTrak100 card. Use the Installing Drive rs section (see page 34).
What is the FastTrak100 RAID Card?
Promise designed its FastTrak100 card to provide a cost-effective, high
performance RAID card that adds performance and/or reliability to PC desktops
and/or servers using Ultra ATA/100, Ultra ATA/66, Ultra ATA/33 or EIDE drives.
FastTrak100 supports striping (RAID 0), mirroring (RAID 1), striping/mirroring (RAID
0+1), or spanning (JBOD) operation , respectively.
With striping, identical drives can read and write data in parallel to increase
performance. Mirroring increases read performance through load balancing and
elevator seek 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 size, but offers no
other RAID functionality.
A FastTrak100 striped array can double the sustained data transfer rate of Ultra
ATA/100 drives. FastTrak100 fully supports Ultra ATA/100 specification of up to
100 MB/sec per drive, depending on 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.