We’re going to check the performance of the Promise FastTrak TX4200 controller in this review. The manufacturer positions it as an inexpensive but high-performance solution.

The Promise TX4200 supports up to four hard disk drives with the Serial ATA interface and allows uniting them into arrays of JBOD, RAID0, RAID1 and RAID10 types. Like the earlier reviewed SiI3124 controller, the Promise TX4200 supports both ATA Tagged Command Queuing (TCQ) and Native Command Queuing (NCQ). That is, the controller is compatible with the Serial ATA II extensions to SATA 1.0.

The potentially weak spot of the controller may be its interface. The PCI32/66MHz interface may prove insufficient for using modern hard drives at their full speed. But on the other hand, it ensures compatibility with a mass of computers whose disk subsystem needs more speed/capacity/reliability (underline what’s important for you)…

A special feature of this review is our investigation of the practical gain from TCQ technology. The software of the Promise controller allows enabling or disabling TCQ and NCQ, so we could run two cycles of tests and get the numbers for every array type with TCQ on and off.

Note that you can turn TCQ/NCQ on or off only for all the drives attached to the controller rather than just for some of them, so we couldn’t check out some even more interesting modes. But there’s good in it – the review would take half a year more to write then.