Installation and drivers

Both Highpoint and Promise offer driver support for most operating systems on the market, including Linux. The Linux kernel supports most controllers in normal operation mode.
The situation is a little tricky when someone wants to use the RAID features provided by the controller under Linux/Unix. Highpoint has drivers for a lot of standard Linux distributions, but unfortunately you need to rebuild the kernel in order to install them. That’s not very easy to do especially when dealing with a remote computer. However, that’s not HighPoint's fault.
Several months ago I tried to find Linux RAID drivers for a Promise controller. At that time I had no luck. Currently there are available Linux drivers for the Promise FastTrak S150 TX2plus, but only several distributions are supported.
The cards' installation into the system was pretty much the same for all products. There are no incredible things to report comparing to the Ultra ATA controllers' installation. In order to test the Serial ATA performance we used the following test setup.

As you can see, the test system is a Pentium 4 regular computer. The PCI bus speed was left at the default 33Mhz setting, although the Promise adapters are able to work at higher speeds. The test HDDs were split in two NTFS partitions: a 5Gb one where the OS was installed and a 10Gb one that was used for tests.