San Jose, Calif. – July 17, 2001 – Promise Technology, Inc. today announced the release of the first non-caching ATA RAID 0, 1, 0+1 card and professional hot swap kit for Ultra ATA/100 drives that supports hot swap* under a four-drive RAID 0+1 array.
Suggested list price for FastTrak100 TX4 will be $149. FastTrak100 TX4 Pro kit lists for $399.
Designed for small office and departmental servers with higher data capacity requirements than two-drive RAID 1 delivers, the FastTrak100 TX4 PCI card houses four independent data channels designed for a total of four standard Ultra ATA/100 hard drives. The TX4 Pro kit bundles the 4-channel RAID card with 4 SuperSwap hot swap removable drive chassises designed for continuous PC operation of a RAID 0+1 array when a drive fails.
When used with SuperSwap drive chassises, TX4 permits users to replace a failed drive using two-drive RAID 1 or four-drive RAID 0+1 arrays without shutting down the PC. Users simply slide out the SuperSwap chassis housing the failed drive, replace the drive, and slide the chassis back in. In addition to supporting hot swap of a RAID 0+1 array, TX4 also supports hot swap of two independent RAID 1 arrays.
TX4 is the latest addition to its industry-leading line of ATA RAID products – the FastTrak100 TX2, TX2 Pro, & LP (low profile) ATA RAID PCI cards and kits.
Compatible with the latest 66MHz PCI bus motherboards, the FastTrak100 TX4 offers data transfer rates in RAID 0 (striping) of up to 200 megabytes (MB) per second (depending on the number and type of drives used in the system). In addition to RAID 0+1, TX4 enables users to configure RAID arrays in RAID 0 (striping) and RAID 1 (mirroring) arrays.
“TX4 satisfies the need for business customers who want run high performance, higher capacity entry-level servers 24x7," said Sam Sirisena, Promise vice president of sales and marketing. “TX4 offers the speed of striping with the fault tolerance of mirroring and continuous operation of hot swap support."
TX4 and TX4 Pro supports both hot spare and hot swap for 24/7 operations. The card supports Windows 2000/NT4/Me/98/95, RedHat Linux 6.2/7.0, and Netware 5.x.
The FastCheck management GUI continually monitors the status of the RAID array, controller card, and SuperSwap chassises. In case of drive failure, FastCheck identifies drive and location of drive on the card.
“With TX4, Promise brings the storage capacity and fault tolerant data protection of more sophisticated servers into the small office or home office environment," Sirisena added. "Compared to similar SCSI storage, FastTrak100 TX4 offers a fully-configured 4-drive RAID 0+1 array with hot swap support at one third the price."
About Promise
Promise Technology, Inc., headquartered in San Jose, is the worldwide leader in ATA RAID storage controllers and subsystems. The company has an impressive track record of design innovations and product introductions since it’s founding in 1988. Promise developed the first IDE caching controller, the first Ultra ATA controller card, and the first controller to offer IDE RAID for desktop PCs (FastTrak). Promise’s other products include the FastTrak100 TX2 ATA RAID card, Ultra100 TX2 PCI card and ConnectStor line of NAS storage products. For more information, visit Promise Technology’s web site at www.promise.com.
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*When used with the Promise SuperSwap removable drive chassises.