Promise enhances Serial ATA for new drives
With new features and support for the latest drive improvements, such as command queuing, the Enhanced SATA adapters offer desktop, workstation, and small server users a storage technology edge, Promise claimed.
The company's Enhanced SATA offering includes two non-RAID controllers, the SATAII150 TX2plus and TX4, and two RAID controllers, the FastTrak TX2200 and TX4200.
For customers wanting to add RAID functionality to their storage systems, the FastTrak TX2200 and TX4200 offer improved performance and data protection. The entry-level TX2200 supports two drives and RAID 0 for improved performance or RAID 1 for data protection. With four Serial ATA ports, the FastTrak TX4200 supports RAID 0, RAID 1, and RAID 10.
The SATAII150 TX2plus and TX4 are non-RAID controllers. For users who want to migrate their existing ATA components to a serial platform, the TX2plus provides a hybrid solution that combines two independent SATA ports and one Parallel ATA channel for support of up to two serial and two Ultra ATA drives. For an all-serial upgrade, the TX4 offers four independent SATA ports for up to four Serial ATA 1.5G drives.
Promise's Enhanced SATA solutions support advanced features including SATA Tagged Command Queuing, Native Command Queuing, and Disk Activity LED headers. With drives that can take advantage of it, Command Queuing increases I/O performance by intelligently reordering data requests so the data can be accessed more quickly.
The host-bus adapter (HBA) line features a low-profile form factor that is compact enough to fit into small rack mount servers. All of the cards support a 66MHz PCI bus for up to 266MB/sec burst data transfer rates. And all of Promise's Enhanced SATA adapters use a Promise ASIC with large LBA support for drives above 137GB and an onboard BIOS that automatically identifies and configures the drive type.
The SATAII150 TX2plus and TX4 controllers cost $41 and $59, respectively. The FastTrak TX2200 and TX4200 controllers cost $100 and $106.