X-bit labs

Promise FastTrak TX4200 4-Port Serial ATA RAID Controller Review

Category: Storage

by Alexey Volkov , Nikita Nikolaichev

[ 06/03/2005 | 02:43 PM ]

Today we are going to take a closer look at the low-cost solution for implementing a RAID 0, RAID 1 or RAID 10 storage system with up to four high performance Serial ATA disk drives. The controller supports Serial ATA II, Extensions to SATA 1.0 specification and features including Native Command Queuing and Disk Activity LED headers. In addition the controller also supports Tagged Command Queuing with drives that can take advantage of this capability. Read the review for more details.

Table of contents:

• Closer Look
  
• Testbed and Methods
  
• Performance in Intel IOMeter Database Pattern
  
• Performance in Intel IOMeter Sequential Read and Write Patterns
  
• Performance in Intel IOMeter File Server and Web Server Patterns
  
• Performance in Intel IOMeter Workstation Pattern
  
• Performance in Intel IOMeter Workstation32 Pattern
  
• Performance in FC-Test NTFS File System
  
• Conclusion
  
• Appendix: Performance in FC-Test FAT32 File System
  

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.