Promise FastTrak SX4000

Last but not least
Promise's FastTrak SX4000 rounds out the cards we're comparing today, and it's probably best described as a middle-of-the-road offering, at least in terms of some of the characteristics we'll be looking at here. The SX4000 is the actually newest entry into the IDE RAID world. While many manufacturers seem to be throwing their weight behind Serial ATA products that are still waiting for the new hard drives to hit the market in full force, Promise appears to be putting a little more energy into supporting existing drives.

The FastTrak SX4000 is quite a bit bigger than HighPoint's RocketRAID 133, but at just under 10" long, it's not quite as large as Adaptec's 2400A. The larger PCB gives the FastTrak SX4000 plenty of room for four IDE connectors and a DIMM slot, though the card itself doesn't ship with a memory module. That's particularly unfortunate because the card is useless without one. You'll have to run out and buy your own 168-pin ECC DIMM (64 to 256MB DIMMs are supported), which adds to the total cost of the package and eliminates the convenience of a card that's ready to go right out of the box. At the very least, Promise should plaster the box with warnings informing consumers that they'll need to buy a DIMM to make the card work.

"RAID 5" is branded across the FastTrak SX4000's ASIC, boldly advertising the card's support of distributed parity, but support for ATA/133 drives is a little more murky. The card will actually read at full ATA/133 speeds, but writes are limited to 100MB/s, which you'd associate with ATA/100. This read/write disparity is unique among the cards we're looking at, and we have some tests that should reveal just how much of an impact the limitation has on real-world performance.

Like Adaptec's 2400A, the FastTrak SX4000 has status LEDs that should come in handy for troubleshooting and general array monitoring. There are only four LEDs (the 2400A has 11), but the lights are on the PCI back plate, which makes them visible from outside the case. Unfortunately, I didn't come across any particularly cool flashing light patterns with the FastTrak SX4000's LEDs, but that's because I didn't run into any problems with the card.

Software-wise, Promise's RAID utilities are similar to those offered by Adaptec and 3ware. The monitoring utilities are easy to use, and they offer network-based remote monitoring.