Here are the controllers we used:

Promise SATA 150 TX4 differs from Promise SATA 150 TX2 Plus by the absence of an ATA/133 channel and two SATA-channels laid out instead.

We should also mention that Promise SATA controllers have one remarkable feature distinguishing them from the SiliconImage solution. If the latter is a fully-fledged SATA controller, then Promise cards were designed from the regular Promise ATA/133 RAID-controllers by adding a sufficient amount of Marvel translators (the Marvel logo on the chip marking indicates that). We have already had some experience with the PATA<->SATA translators, and this solution didn’t improve the performance too much. I wonder how these marvel translators will affect the performance of Promise controller cards...

We used the following software for our tests:

• HDTach 2.61;
• WinBench 99 2.0;
• Intel IOMeter 1999.10.20;
• FC-Test v0.3.

Before the tests the AAM register of all HDDs was set to OFF position (FAST mode) with the help of Hitachi Feature Tool Utility. For WinBench tests all the drives were formatted in FAT32 and NTFS as one logical drive with the default cluster (to format the drives in FAT32 we used Paragon Partition Manager software). The tests were run four times each, the maximum result was taken for the diagrams. The drives didn't cool down between the tests. The tests in Intel IOMeter were run in SequentialRead, SequentialWrite, DataBase, WorkStation, FileServer and WebServer patterns. If you are looking for the detailed description of these patterns, please see our previous articles.

The reviewed hard disk drives had the following firmware versions: