Promise FastTrak SX4300

The FastTrak SX4300 SATA 3Gb/s PCI-X RAID 5 controller delivers industry-leading RAID 5 performance at an unprecedented price/performance ratio. For companies running popular applications like web services, file/email servers, audio/video streaming and nearline storage, the FastTrak SX4300 opens the world of professional RAID 5 performance and data protection and combines it with cost-effective Serial ATA (SATA) 3Gb/s drives for the ultimate internal storage solution. Based on Promise's OEM-proven RAID 5 technology, the FastTrak SX4300 competes with SCSI RAID 5 controllers - at one-half to one-third of the price. The FastTrak SX4300 controller supports Serial ATA 3Gb/s drives and conforms to Serial ATA II, Extensions to SATA 1.0 specification with Native Command Queuing and Disk Activity LED headers support. Command Queuing increases I/O performance by intelligently reordering data requests so that the data can be accessed more quickly. 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 dedicated I/O processor to the controller, Promise's FastTrak SX4300 controller uses an integrated XOR engine for parity calculations, delivering extraordinary performance at a dramatically lower price. This approach takes advantage of today's ultra-powerful PC CPUs to manage the array and outperform traditional RAID 5 solutions.