|
Conclusion
I
am extremely happy that I had the chance to review this controller.
I have to describe my experience with it as a pleasant one, but
I must also admit that it may be a little too much for many users.
The main advantage of TX4 is the number of channels which allow
faster transfers and improved redundancy.
|
There
are several areas of interest where FastTrack TX4 can be very
useful. One of the best usage for TX4 is the RAID 0+1 mode
with the ability to have in system a spare disk drive to replace
a potential failed disk. The four drives different channels
stripping provides a strong performance increase for that
kind of applications which require it.
But there are several more areas where TX4 can be used without
the need to use RAID. Let's suppose that you have a lot of
independent harddisks and you want to build a file server,
but without using RAID 0 or 1. With the motherboard onboard
controller and the TX4 you have six independent IDE channels.
You can add a harddisk on every channel and avoid the known
master - slave performance degradation.
Promise is the biggest company which produces ATA RAID controllers
and many integrators trust them. I think that the user support
and driver updates will be on the top for this product. After
all it's a Promise high end product.
|
|
I
don't have complains about this product. Drivers are good, reliability
on the top, documentation very good. The performance could have
been better at least in the 4 devices stripping mode, but I have
the feeling that it's not FastTrack's fault. We tried only benchmarks,
not real world files copies which have to gain a lot in stripping.
SiSoft Sandra revealed a huge score, but do not expect to this procentual
improvement even when you work with extremely disk intensive applications.
FastTrack TX4 is in my knowledge a product which doesn't have competition
on the market. Even without a base of comparison we gave the Editors
Choice to Promise FastTrack TX4 because it proved to be a reliable,
powerful and well documented solution.
|
23:20 
Tagan TG480-U01 480W ATX / EPS Power Supply Review 
Advertisement
