3Ware Escalade 7500
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3ware's entry into this melee of multi-drive RAID action is the four-channel incarnation of the Escalade 7500. The Escalade name itself is trendy these days, since I've been informed that all the hottest rappers are rhyming about how phat Cadillac's new Escalade SUV is. What do Cadillac and 3ware's Escalades have in common? Absolutely nothing, so let's get off that tangent.
3ware actually offers the Escalade 7500 in several different flavors depending on how many drives you want to connect. Today, we're looking at the four-channel version of the card, which 3ware refers to as the Escalade 7500-4. If I refer to the card as simply the Escalade 7500 during the course of this review, don't get confused; I'm talking about the 7500-4.
That looks nothing like a gas-guzzling SUV
The Escalade 7500 is one of the smallest RAID cards in our comparo, but it's just long enough to squeeze in compatibility with 64-bit/33MHz PCI slots. Looking at the PCB, you'll notice space for four additional IDE connectors and an extra chip. The eight-channel version of the Escalade 7500 uses the same PCB, but with extra hardware packed on to fill the open spaces.
Unlike a couple of the other RAID cards here, the Escalade 7500's cache is embedded, which means you can't swap in a different DIMM if you want to give your array more cache to play with. You'll also notice that the Escalade 7500's ASIC is a 3ware chip. All of the cards we'll be looking at today use different RAID chips, which gives us a nice bit of diversity that should make the benchmark results quite interesting.
As we just saw with that nifty comparison chart, the Escalade 7500 supports RAID 10 instead of 0+1, which gives it an edge in redundancy. The Escalade 7500 is also the only card to support full ATA/133 read and write speeds in a RAID 5 configuration.
3ware ships some RAID management software with the Escalade 7500, as do all the manufacturers included in this comparison. The software is generally good, unobtrusive, and easy to work with, though all the manufacturers include similar array management software in the box.
