Today ClubOC takes a step in a new direction as we review a product that is unlike anything we have had in our labs before, the Promise Technology FastTrak SX4000 Four-Channel Ultra ATA RAID 5 Host Adapter. Targeted towards workstations and servers, the SX4000 is designed to bring something to your business that you may not be use to, a low cost solution for full featured RAID! In the past, servers and workstations relied on the extremely expensive SCSI hard drives and RAID cards to deliver mass storage with data redundancy. Thanks to Promise Technology, there is a low cost Ultra ATA solution that will handle up to 4 Ultra ATA hard drives while delivering the performance and reliability of RAID 5, 0+1, 1, and 0. The SX4000 is one feature packed RAID card, but can it deliver the performance needed in the demanding workstation or server environment? We are about to find out!

Special Features

• Supports low-cost Ultra ATA drives including Ultra ATA/133 1 , Ultra ATA/100, Ultra ATA/66 and others. Provides advanced CRC error-checking at higher drive speeds
• Supports 66MHz PCI bus motherboards capable of transferring data up to 266MB per second (backward compatible with 33MHz PCI bus transfers of 133MB/sec)
• Provides RAID 5 XOR data parity calculation to protect data on attached hard drives in the event of a hard disk failure.
• Accepts up to 256MB SDRAM (64MB minimum required 2 ) cache memory
• Supports use of hot spare drive for immediate drive rebuilding in event of drive failure
• Onboard BIOS recognizes and configures attached drives for optimum speed 1 and full capacity
• BIOS supports 48-bit large LBA mode to allow use of drives exceeding 137GB
• Easy installation and RAID setup lets all users quickly create the type of RAID their environment requires
• Offers graphical user interface (Windows NT/2000/XP) that remotely and locally alerts user in case of drive failure and identifies failed drive but continues to allow user to save and retrieve data from working drive (or pair of drives)
• Works with Windows XP/2000/NT; RedHat Linux 7.2/7.3; TurboLinux Server 6.5/7.0; SuSE Linux 7.3/8.0; and Caldera OpenLinux. 3.1/3.1.1.
• Supported and tested by major hard disk drive manufacturers

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