Disk Controller

I know of two companies that make disk controllers that can control six or more IDE channels, and have hardware support for RAID-5. These are 3Ware and Promise. If you know of another IDE disk controller that does this, please send E-mail to webmaster@accs.com.

3Ware 6800

Production of this controller ended in December 2001.

This controller uses a full-length 32-bit 5V PCI slot. It supports up eight channels, with one drive each. It supports hot-swap. This is the slowest of the 3Ware cards. If you have at least three controllers, they should work quite well when 100 Megabit connections are being used. 3Ware says that they have tested three controllers in a system, and they know of no reason why more than three would not work.

This controller was originally designed to support RAID-0 and RAID-1. The RAID-5 capability was added later. Early versions of this board may have problems, and it is suggested that the BIOS be updated to the latest version. Also, the processor on this card is slower than on the 7800 series cards. This should have no effect when running RAID-0 or RAID-1, but will result in a significant slowdown when running RAID-5.

With the latest firmware, this card supports the new big drive (>137GB) standard, allowing 160GB and larger drives to be used.

3Ware 7800

Production of this controller ended in April 2002.

This controller uses a full-length 64-bit 33MHz 5V PCI slot. It supports up eight channels, with one drive each. It supports hot-swap. This card is fairly fast. It uses the speed of the 64-bit PCI bus to get peak (not sustained) transfer rates of 266 Megabytes per second. One or two of these cards will provide excellent throughput where only 100 Megabit connections are being used. Four of these cards should work very well with Gigabit connections. Write performance of these cards is not much better than on the 6800. 3Ware says that they have tested three controllers in a system, and they know of no reason why more than three would not work.

This card has been shown to work in a 32-bit slot.

With the latest firmware, this card supports the new big drive (>137GB) standard, allowing 160GB and larger drives to be used.

3Ware 7810

Production of this controller ended in April 2002.

This controller uses a half-length 64-bit 33MHz 5V PCI slot. This is a 7800 with a different layout of the card. Functionally, it is the same.

All 3Ware 7810 cards shipped prior to November 10, 2001 have been recalled by the manufacturer. If you have one of these, please contact 3Ware for an RMA.

With the latest firmware, this card supports the new big drive (>137GB) standard, allowing 160GB and larger drives to be used.

3Ware 7850

The name of this controller was changed from 7850 to 7500-8 in April 2002.

This controller uses a half-length 64-bit 33MHz 5V PCI slot. This is a 7810 with additional buffer memory. The write speed under RAID-5 was sigificantly improved by this modification. This is the suggested card where many writes are being performed.

All 3Ware 7810 cards shipped prior to November 10, 2001 have been recalled by the manufacturer. If you have one of these, please contact 3Ware for an RMA.

With the latest firmware, this card supports the new big drive (>137GB) standard, allowing 160GB and larger drives to be used.

3Ware 7500-12

This controller uses a full-length 64-bit 33MHz 5V PCI slot. This is a 7500-8 with four additional ports, and additional memory. It supports the big drive (>137GB) standard.

Promise SuperTrak 100

This controller uses a full-length 32-bit 5V PCI slot. It supports up to six channels, with one drive each. Also, you can't put more than two of these cards into a single system. It supports hot-swap. With only six channels, and only two cards per system, this card places a strict upper limit of 1TB on the size of the disk array that can be connected to a system.

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