Promise vs. Highpoint RAID

[Jeff H]

Guys,

I was reading a review of the MSI 845PE mobo on Hexus.net, and the following quote triggered a question:

MSI prefer the Promise variety of RAID chip, ABIT, EPox, et al, prefer Highpoint. Both work well, but the Highpoint solution is more flexible in offering RAID 0+1 support and allowing you to use the ports as standalone solutions.

Does this statement imply that the Promise PDC20276 RAID chip does not support running a single drive (via the onboard RAID controller)? I'm going to build a system shortly (for a friend) and I'd like to run his HD via an onboard RAID solution. If the Promise chip won't support a single drive I'll have to rethink my choice of board. I was leaning heavily toward the Asus P4PE P4PE/R/L/SATA, which also uses a Promise RAID chip, but this MSI 845PE MAX2 FIR board also looks interesting. However, if they won't support a single drive I'll need to start looking at boards w/ the HighPoint 372 chip.

 

[LED]

No worries as the Promise chip doers support 2 independent IDE channels and up to four UDMA/133/100/66/33 or EIDE drives as the Highpoint does...The Highpoint has better performance in RAID from my experience and lets the stripe set-up clusters to be configed.

Edit= Here are the Promise Specs
PROMISE PDC20276 ASIC is a PCI bus mastering ATA controller chip that supports complete UDMA/133 specifications. It communicates with the PCI bus using a burst bus mastering and advanced scatter/gather engine for better overall system performance.

Disk Array Features


Supports RAID 0 (striping) or RAID 1 (mirroring), RAID 0 & RAID 1 non-coexist

Offers double sustained data transfer rate of attached drive(RAID 0)

Supports Ultra ATA/133/100/66/33 and EIDE drives

Supports "hot" swap of failed drive (used with PROMISE "SuperSwap" product)

Offers transparent data recovery and auto-rebuild drive in background

Arrays are bootable with built-in BIOS by the Master channel of PROMISE ATA RAID

The Master Channel HDD of PROMISE ATA RAID support RAID 0 or RAID 1 function

The Slave Channel HDD of PROMISE ATA RAID are to be as ATA HDD
Host Bus Interface


32-bit PCI interface compliant to PCI Rev 2.2

Up to 66MHz bus speed & 266MB/sec burst data transfer rate

Co-exists with built-in IDE channels or other SCSI controllers
Ultra ATA/133 Interface


Supports Ultra ATA/133 specification of 133MB/sec transfers with CRC error-checking

Two independent IDE channels support up to four UDMA/133/100/66/33 or EIDE drives
Compatibility & Utilities


GUI monitors status of array

BIOS utility for configuration and maintenance
Driver support


Windows 9x/ME/NT/2000/XP

RedHat Linux

SuSE Linux

Turbo Linux

Caldera Linux

NetWare

 

[Jeff H]

LED, thanks for the reply. Your response makes my decision on a board for my friend much easier. He's basically going to ask me what I'm recommending, and then go w/ that.