Promise Technology FastTrak S150 - Manual (Page 5)

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Chapter 1: Introduction
Thank you for purchasing Promise Technology’s FastTrak S150 TX4 RAID
controller card. The PC which you are using either already contains FastTrak
S150 TX4 installed by a third-party or you have acquired a FastTrak S150 TX4
retail product for your existing PC and plan to install the card yourself.
• For PC owners wishing to install their FastTrak S150 TX4 RAID controller
card, go to Chapter 2: Installation on page 5.
• For PCs with a FastTrak S150 TX4 RAID controller card already installed,
and you are experiencing any difficulties with the hard drive being
recognized by the card go to the Chapter 6: Troubleshooting on page 51.
• 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 S150 TX4 RAID
controller card. See Chapter 4: Installing Drivers on page 33.
FastTrak S150 TX4
Promise originally designed the FastTrak S150 TX4 as a cost-effective, high
performance RAID controller card that adds performance and/or reliability to PC
desktops and/or servers using Serial ATA drives.
FastTrak S150 TX4 has three independent data channels to support a maximum
of four Serial ATA drives. FastTrak S150 TX4 supports:
• Striping (RAID 0) – Identical drives can read and write data in parallel to
increase performance.
• Mirroring (RAID 1) – Mirroring increases read performance through load
balancing and elevator sorting while creating a complete backup of your
files.
• Striping / Mirroring (RAID 0+1) – Combining striping with mirroring offers
both high read/write performance and fault tolerance
A FastTrak S150 TX4 striped array can double the sustained data transfer rate
of Serial ATA drives.
FastTrak S150 TX4 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. Each model offers RAID 1 mirroring (for two drives)
and RAID 0+1 mirroring plus striping (for four drives) to protect data.
Should a drive that is part of a mirrored array fail, FastTrak S150 TX4 uses the
mirrored drive (which contains identical data) to assume all data handling.
When a new replacement drive is later installed, FastTrak S150 TX4 rebuilds
data to the new drive from the mirrored drive to restore fault tolerance.
FastTrak S150 TX4 bootable BIOS supports individual drives larger than 137
GB. With FAT32 and NTFS partitioning, the array can be addressed as one
large single volume.