Fasttrak IDE RAID array (Promise FastTrak66 Ultra ATA/66 RAID Card)

Member Name: Nutt

Product:	Promise FastTrak66 Ultra ATA/66 RAID Card
Date:	01/07/00 (1108 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: FAST! and relatively cheap for the preformance and size

Disadvantages: a little complex to set up, but if you can install windows you can do this

As cool as it sounds.... Now ive been accused of being a bit of a geek, yeah I supose im guilty as charged (but not in public, honest! I do go to the local beerkeller occasionaly :-P) but anyone who likes playing with new, fun, fast hardware as much as I do will love this little hack. Using a small resistor and a little knowlage that can be found on the net you can turn an ordinary £30 PCI IDE interface card designed to let you use ata-66 hard drives on older systems or add more hard drives to an already full system into a kick ass speed machine!!! RAID (redundent array of inexpensive disks) basicaly allows you to take to or more hard drives and use them as either one big disk, or halve the total size of the disks and mirror the data you store on them. This means that by buying two cheap IDE hard drives and combining them you can get one big drive twice the size of the smaller one that runs nearly twice as fast as the individual drives. This leads to an impressive decrese in boot and load times, and a huge improvement in any video manipulation work. Usualy SCSI hard drives are used for raid, but using a fasstrak card (what the card is turned into by the hack) or another similar card you can do the same thing with IDE disks, which are a little slower but considerably cheaper. If your thinking of getting more storge space, and would like a super fast disk drive take a look into RAID



I have 2 20 gig IBM GXP's for a total of 40 gigs storage, I get aprox 50 MB per second transfers. My setup cost me about £275



for more info visit www.storagereview.com my site at www.codeweevils.co.uk

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