Head-to-Head: Iwill sIDE RAID66 vs Promise FastTrak66

[ArticleRobot]

After our review of Iwill's sIDE RAID66, we received countless numbers of emails requesting a comparison between it, and Promise's FastTrak66. To those of you who asked, HardwareCentral delivers!

http://www.hardwarecentral.com/hardw.../reviews/1746/

[Moraelin]

I have just one extra question. NT also offers the option to do software based RAID. (And so does linux.) Probably Win2k should still have that option, too.

Now my question would be: how does that software RAID compare to either of the two RAID cards? Is it faster, slower, about the same? Does it use more/less CPU power? (My guess would be that both cards probably do software RAID, too, via the drivers and their BIOS anyway.)

I.e., if you're running NT, is it worth buying one of these cards? (Well, ok, so it probably is anyway, since you'll want the hard drives on different channels for maximum performance, and then you need a third channel for the CD-ROM. Which the motherboard doesn't have )

But other than this curiosity of mine, I must say it's an excellent article.

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Moraelin -- the proud member of the Idiots' Guild

[dadams]

Thanks for the comparison! Some time ago I purchased the Fastrac 66 card for it's raid 1 ability, after loosing 2 WD hardrives in 9 months. I find it unfortunate that products like this take a back seat to the newest fastest CPU's, in most of the media.
Sincerely,
Denis

[nDimention]

If you want more performance I sugest going SCSI...Much better option in every way but price ..I can be downloading, playing Quake 3, and doing a CD to CD copy all at the same time.....

Originally posted by Moraelin:
I have just one extra question. NT also offers the option to do software based RAID. (And so does linux.) Probably Win2k should still have that option, too.

Now my question would be: how does that software RAID compare to either of the two RAID cards? Is it faster, slower, about the same? Does it use more/less CPU power? (My guess would be that both cards probably do software RAID, too, via the drivers and their BIOS anyway.)

I.e., if you're running NT, is it worth buying one of these cards? (Well, ok, so it probably is anyway, since you'll want the hard drives on different channels for maximum performance, and then you need a third channel for the CD-ROM. Which the motherboard doesn't have )

But other than this curiosity of mine, I must say it's an excellent article.

[kprag]

Will the Promise FastTrak66 improve performance when using ThumbsPlus to make thumbnails (which is very slow)?
Also, I currently have two harddrives a 13gig and 27gig. Can I just purchase another drive and have two drives hooked to RAID and the other one normal? Will the data on the one harddrive have to be erased?

Kevin

[XkALiBRe]

I don't know much about Thumbplus - I've never used it.

But yes, you can just buy another 13G, for example, and use it and your current 13G in an array, and use the 27G separately. You will have to format the hard drive you want to use in an array with the new disk. If you can backup the data on to another drive, you can simply copy it back once you have the array set up.

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"In the computer industry, there are three kinds of lies;
lies, damn lies, and benchmarks."