RAID Hardware Decision

[UNLTuba]

I am having major issues with my Promise FastTrak66 RAID card in my new system and am looking for a new card. I only need it to be able to handle two 40GB drives (in RAID 0 - storage) and one 10GB drive (boot), so nothing extremely expensive. Any suggestions would be great. Thanks!

PS - I'm in the middle of contacting Promise tech support to try and solve my FastTrak66 problems before I go out and spend money, but still I think I have to start looking.

 

[thomsbrain]

the promise tx2 works pretty well...

 

[RichardInLA]

I was about to purchase the Abit KR7A until I learned that it was likely to conflict with my SCSI card. Abit has since announced a fix, but before they did I bought a non-RAID m/b (Shuttle AK31A, which works fine).

I still wanted RAID, so I gambled on an ACard 6880 - much less expensive than Promise and also supports ATA 133. I've attached two 40GB Maxtor 7200rpm ATA 133 drives, and all works fine. The m/b BIOS, the Adaptec SCSI BIOS, and the ACard BIOS are, amazingly, co-existing. The m/b and the ACard total cost is about the same as the Abit KR7A, but this approach does cost you a PCI slot.

I benchmarked using the speed tester that is part of the Roxio CD burner s/w. The reported performance improvement is too big to believe. Can anyone recommend a good, free, disk benchmark program? Thx.