NEC SA2500 User Manual - Promise Fasttrack S150 Sx4
User Guide
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Promise FastTrack S150 SX4
Highlights
■ Four-port Serial ATA RAID controller with 1.5Gbps per channel.
■ 32-Bit/66MHz PCI 2.2 interface.
■ Support for RAID level 0, 1, 10, 5 and JBOD.
■ Online array expansion and RAID level migration to add capacity on the fly.
■ Supports hot swap of failed drives.
■ Automatic/manual rebuild of hot spare drive.
■ PerfectRAID technology for robust error handling and recovery of fatal, media and
disk errors.
■ Variable stripe block size support enables optimization for diverse application
requirements.
■ Supports up to 256MB of SDRAM memory.
Maximize RAID Performance with Serial ATA Drives
The FastTrak S150 SX4 is designed for RAID-perfect Serial ATA. Serial ATA is an
evolutionary replacement for the Parallel ATA physical storage interface. The Serial
ATA standard incorporates highly anticipated features that are ideally suited for ATA
RAID use such as:
- Thinner Serial ATA cables up to one meter long to provide flexible rout-
ing and better airflow.
- No jumper setting is required.
- Point-to-point configuration to support one drive per cable and achieve
performance scalability.
- Higher availability with hot pluggable drive support.
- Enhanced reliability with CRC error checking on all protocol phases.
Promise Hardware-Assisted RAID 5 Architecture
RAID 5 implementation involves striping data and parity information (XOR) across the
storage array. Since those parity calculations are so processor-intensive, RAID 5
controllers traditionally require a dedicated CPU to perform the XOR calculations and
manage the array.
Instead of adding a costly CPU to the controller, Promise's FastTrak S150 SX4
controller uses an integrated XOR engine for parity calculations, delivering
extraordinary performance at a lower price.