After having my 3 months young Samung SATA disk crash, and spending (WASTING!) considerable time recovering from old backups, old disks etc.etc. I came to the conclusion that my workstation needs a pro-like storage sub system.

Of course I have TWO RAID1 controllers on my ASUS P4e800 board – but both of them simply suck. Windows setup simply blue screens when accessing such a device via the one controller (Promise SATA controller with SATA RAID option)... the second controller (INTEL ICH5 RAID!) does not even have a "clone" function to make a good RAID1 array from a single "good" system disk… cheap add-ons for people that never intend to use it… altough it's an INTEL brand hardware, I would never recommend anyone relying on that built in crap… if you already hassle around that much for setup – can you imagine a recovery scenario?

I need to setup a RAID5 array which should enable me to have safe functionality as long as only 1 disk fails at the cost of only 1/3 … and a third of 200 GB x 3 is still a 200 GB disk :-)

My hardware dealer suggested the controller FastTrak S150 SX4 a pretty low-cost, but full features RAID5 SATA controller…

Important features per homepage

• Four-port Serial ATA RAID controller with 1.5Gbps per channel
• 32-Bit/66MHz PCI 2.2 interface
• Support for RAID level 0, 1, 10, 5 and JBOD
• Online array expansion and RAID level migration to add capacity on the fly
• Supports hot swap of failed drives
• Automatic/manual rebuild of hot spare drive
• Variable stripe block size support enables optimization for diverse application requirements
• Promise RAID Processor with XOR engine for RAID parity calculations
• Supports up to 256MB of SDRAM memory in a 168-pin DIMM slot supports up to 256MB of ECC
• Seamless upgrade to Promise's external storage solutions (have to look at those as well…
• FRAM for RAID5 transaction log to avoid data corruption in the event of application hang … FRAM is Ferroelectric RAM - said to be 20,000 times faster than flash memory and costs 25% less than battery-backed SRAM... means this should keep everything consistent

Some reviews I found on this device let it look very nice:

• Tom's Hardware review – Cheap and Reliable RAID 5 Storage Compared
• Complete RAID5 setup guide for the Promise ... they even measured that adding a 4th drive to the RAID5 setup caused 22% faster average reads, a 40% better Web server score, and a whopping 45% higher file server rating… nice…
• Ebabble – ATA RAID2003 project ... a very informative site testing a dozen of controllers… finding that even much higher priced controllers suck in terms of performance…
• XBIT Labs Review
• Tweakers RAID controller review ... this review describes this controller as aged out , favouring newer devices with higher on board performance and full hardware raiding… this FastTrak only does the XOR encoding in hardware, not the RAID logic… means it costs more CPU than with these "intelligen" cards…
• Driver downloads for the controller are here