You've been putting this off for a long time ...

If you're a small business owner who operates out of your SOHO, you've probably thought about better ways to keep your precious data safe. Sure, you can try to remember to backup every week using Zip disks or tapes, but unless you're just starting out, that "painless" one-disk backup is not going to happen; instead, you're in for the better part of a day swapping media and answering screen prompts. If you have access to a server somewhere, maybe you can get someone else to automatically back up your data, but few of us have that option. Ultimately, there's nothing like a complete automatic backup copy of your data waiting for the probably unlikely, but scary, day when your hard disk finally gives up.

RAID (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks) controllers have been around for years, but almost exclusively in the SCSI world. Since SCSI drives, cables, and controllers usually cost a good deal more than their IDE counterparts, it raises a question about the "I" part of RAID. Fortunately, IDE-based RAID controllers like the FastTrack100 TX2 are becoming common.

I bought the Promise controller for two reasons: 1) it was fairly inexpensive, and 2) I already had been using a Maxtor-labeled Promise ATA100 controller in my system for about six months without a hitch. Promise actually makes three different variations of the card, including a low-profile model for small-footprint cases, and a 4-channel "TX4" version -- really two TX2 controllers on one board -- for more involved RAID setups.

Setting up the drives was straightforward. In most cases, all that is required is an empty PCI slot, as the TX2 can share PCI interrupts, and seems to stay out of the way of other PCI devices. If your PC's case has a spare disk activity LED, the TX2 card can connect to it. The card looks like a SCSI controller to Windows, and stays out of the way of the "legacy" IDE controllers on the motherboard. The two IDE channels are located on the top of the card, and well marked. Promise recommends that the first two drives both be connected as IDE masters. With two drives, the user has a choice of interconnecting the drives to make one large, speedy drive (RAID 0), or copying the data onto both drives for safety (RAID 1). If four drives are used, both options can be selected (RAID 0 1).

The controller will not work with ATAPI drives like CD readers and Zip drives, so you'll still need your on-board IDE controllers for those devices. One potential stumbling block: If you are running Windows NT, Windows 2000, and probably, Windows XP, the RAID driver must be installed in Windows BEFORE the hardware is added to the PCI slot; otherwise, the drive(s) won't be seen by the OS, and you may be in for a struggle to get back to square one. The manual states this in several places, but I'll bet that many new users miss the warning.

I opted for security over performance, and set up a RAID 1 pair. While Promise recommends that you start with two pristine drives, there is an option to copy an existing drive to a second drive, and thus convert your single-drive PC into a RAID system for the cost of the TX2 plus an extra drive. The controller is smart enough to check to make sure the new drive is at least as big as the old one (adding a smaller drive could be disastrous), and if you are working with two new drives, it rounds their value off to the last whole MB region you passed; this way, a failed 80MB drive can be replaced with any other drive of 80MB or greater capacity, rather than hunting in vain for a match to your 3-year-old 81.65MB one. I added a new Maxtor 7200RPM 80GB drive to my existing Maxtor 5400RPM 80MB, made a few selections according to the manual, and after a painfully long time watching the progress bar -- it takes a lot longer to copy 80MB than one might think -- the system was back up and running ...

... Well, for a little while, anyway. After the fourth or fifth boot, the hard disk LED suddenly stayed on, and the next time I booted, the Promise controller told me that one of the disks in the array had failed. (!!!) After the initial near heart attack, I reasoned that such a situation COULDN'T have happened that quickly, as the older drive of the pair was less than six months old. I decided to take a chance and ask the controller to rebuild the "failed" drive. After another long wait, everything was back in service.

This problem repeated itself several times in the next two weeks, and I eventually read between the lines in the manual, and reasoned that my problem was likely because I was using two IDE drives with different performance. A call to Promise Tech Support confirmed that yes, there are some issues that can happen if the two drives respond to commands differently.

Finally, I bit the bullet and ordered a third drive, identical to the second one. I suspect that this problem isn't completely Promise's fault. One of the reasons that RAID controllers started in the SCSI world is that SCSI has better communications for handling multiple (and different) devices at the same time. IDE works in a RAID 1 configuration, but my gut feel is that it only works under certain conditions. Since I've changed to two identical drives, I've yet to be informed of a drive "failure."

The TX2 with two identical drives handles application installs, small and large file transfers, and most other hard drive tasks just as if it were a single drive. It also runs the Windows 2000 NTFS test (if scheduled during the boot sequence) without a hitch. The only issue that I've seen is that non-Windows disk tests such as the reliability test in Norton Speed Disk routinely fail.

A couple of interesting points:

1) When I contacted Promise Support and told them about my earlier problems, the tech immediately suspected that my issue was due to the fact that I still had the other (ATA100) Promise IDE controller in the system. In fact, every promise tech that I've talked to tells me that it shouldn't work. The manual, however, implies otherwise, and despite the warnings, the two controllers coexist peacefully. Perhaps its because I only have CD-RW's on the other controller, so it doesn't load its ATA100 BIOS. Your mileage may vary.

2) I've watched the LEDs on the two hard drives, and they aren't always in sync during either reads or writes. Maybe there's something to my IDE-works-but-just-barely theory.

Prices vary a lot, but the $170 price shown here on Epinions seems awfully high to me: I bought an OEM-pack card from Directron.com for $79.

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ADDENDUM -- 10-31-2002: I've been using the controller for several more months, and after upgrading from Norton SystemWorks 2001 to the 2002 version, my Norton Utilities issues seem to have vanished. I can now run Speed Disk and NDD with the kind of results expected with a single HDD. Perhaps Symantec has made some changes to better support RAID systems?

-BW