Promise FastTrack TX2000 - Page 2

The Package

We got the retail Promise's FastTrack TX2000 box. It includes: the PCI card itself, 2 printed manuals (user's guide and Promise Array Management Utility guide), two 80pin cable ribbons and four (4) diskettes with the neseccery drivers and the Promise Array Management Utility software. The FastTrack TX2000 can be used with the PCI 33Mhz that most current M/B uses, but also with PCI 66Mhz. Note that few M/B support the PCI 66Mhz interface. For our tests we used a free PCI 33Mhz slot from our test PC. We will try in near future testing the same card under PCI 66Mhz interface connection. The card costs around 100-120$.

The FastTrack TX2000 is a medium PCI card that supports 2 IDE Channels with ATA133 interface connection.

- Test Setup

For measuring the RAID 0,1,0+1 we used two identical drives with ATA133 connection interface from Maxtor. We used Maxtor 740DX 40GB drives which connected at both Promise's TX2000 IDE1, IDE2 as MASTER. Under WinXP we installed the included software for RAID management and getting the maximum performance. From our tests, we created manually (through Define Array setting) the RAID 0 and RAID1 levels. Especially for the RAID 0 level, we used various settings for the Stip size of 8Kb, 64Kb, 128Kb, 512Kb and 1024Kb. At the RAID 1 level we only have one setting. Since we used only two drives, we didn't tested the RAID 0+1 mode, which offers high performance with security. In near future we will try testing this mode also. Last don't forget that the FastTrack TX2000 supports PCI 66Mhz, which supposed to offer increased performance. Unfortunaly most M/B doesn't supports such feature, expcept few that are for server use.