Promise Technology

Promise Technology is a major player on the storage market. Promise controllers are used in a variety of devices and by many top hardware integrators. Although Promise is known for their end-user products, the company also manufactures several products targeted to the professional market. I won’t get into details with the professional products, but I want to present a member of the Promise SATA family.

Promise FastTrak S150 TX2plus product picture

FastTrak S150 TX2plus is a serial ATA controller having RAID 0, 1 and 0+1 capabilities. This controller is able to work with two Serial ATA 150 drives and with two Ultra ATA 133 drives. This design is based on a compromise because at the time when I write this review the quantity of SATA harddisks available on the market is pretty limited and the prices of the SATA disks are higher than the prices of the traditional Ultra ATA disks.
The FastTrak S150 TX2plus box has the same dimensions like the boxes used by the Highpoint controllers, but I liked more its design due to the superior ergonomic features. Inside the box you can find the quick start guide, a product reference guide, the card, two serial ATA cables, one Ultra ATA cable, one driver disk and one CD containing the array management utils and the manual. The quick start guide is multilingual and describes the installation process pretty nice. Overall, the Promise packaging is superior to Highpoint's.

The controller design is simple and it’s based on the Promise PDC20371. The chip supports natively the SATA protocol, there is no need to use a bridge in the controller logic like in Highpoint Rocket 1511. Promise is known to manufacture 66Mhz bus compatible products and the FastTrak S150 TX2plus makes no exception to this rule.

Promise S150 TX2plus product picture

SATA150 TX2plus is the second controller from Promise I will review. The product packaging is virtually identical, except that you will find no CD disk in the SATA150 TX2plus box and only one SATA cable. The CD disk is not necessary because the SATA150 TX2plus doesn’t present any RAID features. Other than the RAID features the two products are pretty much identical. The host controller chip used by SATA150 TX2plus is different. It uses PDC20375, a chip that doesn’t support any RAID features. Starting with 01/01/2003 all Promise products have 3 years warranty.