Promise FastTrack/FastSwap IDE RAID Controller

For home/business users, including gamers, the FastTrack IDE RAID solution has absolutely no real world benefit that would even begin to cause you to want the solution. Once the picture shifts into the high-end scene however, things begin to change. The 15 - 20% real world performance improvement under most high-end applications is definitely enough to justify the added cost of the FastTrack IDE RAID controller (around $115 - $130).

Keeping in mind that ideally, with any RAID solution, you'll want to use identical drives (your array is only as fast as the slowest drive in the array), a complete FastTrack setup can quickly add up to a somewhat overwhelming cost. Before embarking on a 100% FastTrack journey, compare prices to make sure that you're indeed getting the most bang for your buck out of this IDE RAID solution.

If the majority of the applications you run depend on long sequential read/write transfers, then the FastTrack solution will be ideal for you in terms of performance. Although FastTrack also offers RAID mirroring, the purpose of the FastTrack controller was never intended to be as a server solution simply due to the fact that IDE devices usually don't have much of a desired presence in server environments due to their increased CPU utilization vs SCSI devices. It is because of this that the fact that the FastTrack supports RAID 1 is considered negligible. There are very few home users that would need immediate backups of their personal documents should their hard drive fail.

A feature left desired, one that may or may not be implemented at a later time, would be Ultra ATA/66 support by the FastTrack controller. Other than that, Promise has a unique share of the market with the FastTrack, let's just hope that for Promise's sake, SCSI prices don't drop all that much.