ATA RAID

Want more performance (i.e. response) from your everyday applications when saving or retrieving a file? Are you concerned about protecting data from a hard drive crash -- even if you do have a tape backup?

If you answer yes to either question, Promise ATA RAID makes strong sense. ATA RAID simply uses multiple low-cost ATA drives in a RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks) to do the perform the work of a single drive, or to provide continuous storage to a PC in case one of the drives fails.

ATA RAID Concept
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This unique storage concept offers low-cost RAID performance and protection inside today's desktop PCs. Major drive manufacturers like IBM, Seagate, Maxtor, and others have identified this trend not only as a way to enhance a customer's purchase of their low-cost Ultra ATA/DMA drives, but to protect that investment over time.

What makes ATA RAID so compelling is that by using more than one Ultra ATA/DMA drive with a Promise ATA RAID motherboard, controller, or subsystem, users obtain storage capabilities that rival the highest performance, most expensive hard drives available. And ATA RAID can offer one thing that single drive systems cannot: data redundancy every time the PC saves a file. Only expensive network servers have ever before consistently offered such capabilities.

How Much Will It Cost?
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With the costs of Ultra ATA/DMA drives rapidly falling, adding an extra UDMA hard drive to a system has very little impact on the overall system price. For under $300, any user can realize virtually continuous data protection without worrying about the consequences of a drive failing. How much is such peace of mind worth?

For under $350, performance-focused PCs can dramatically boost their storage performance of standard Ultra ATA/DMA drives...up to double the transfer rate of a single ATA drive. And users can combine multiple drives to build a huge "virtual" drive that's larger than the newest technology capacities available.

Compare the cost of Promise ATA RAID plus an extra drive with a single high performance SCSI card/controller. Even today, SCSI drives and controllers are significantly more expensive than their ATA counterparts without any of the benefits RAID provides.

Are There Alternatives?
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For most desktop PCs, the only alternative to ATA RAID is using SCSI drives and controllers for performance. Unfortunately, even traditional SCSI drives/controller combinations are 50% more expensive than an ATA RAID solution which offers greater performance choices.

SCSI RAID does exist, but is too expensive for all but most powerful desktop workstations. That's because SCSI RAID uses several expensive SCSI drives in a RAID array to boost performance and offer data protection. SCSI RAID has always been used as the storage heart of a network server. After all, you don't want a drive to fail and cause the whole network to fail, your e-mail system to die, or your company's website to crash. Unfortunately, only medium-to-large sized companies have had the pockets deep enough to afford SCSI RAID subsystems.

Without a competitive alternative, companies with 50 employees or less have often resorted to network operations with a single drive server and a tape backup. In other words, if the single drive crashed, the system could only be rebuilt as of the date of the last tape backup.

Promise ATA RAID offers these same companies (including medium-sized companies) the ability to afford continuous data protection for their network server.

Why RAID for Me?
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The Promise ATA RAID concept is important for individual users of desktop PCs. Today's data on PCs grows more valuable every day -- often exceeding the value of the PC itself. Promise ATA RAID offers the least expensive insurance to ongoing data protection yet, while using the most reliable, biggest capacity media available: a hard drive. Promise ATA RAID is as fast as using your PC normally, since it automatically sends identical drive data every time a file is saved.

When a file is retrieved, users access data from multiple drives twice as fast as from a single drive that must carry out two data requests for every one operation made by a RAID array.

What Makes Sense
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Promise ATA RAID, with low-cost ATA drives, makes sense for virtually every corporate, industrial, retail, home office, and small office environment. It means little to no downtime in case a drive crashes. It means better application performance everytime a file is saved or retrieved. It means greater economy and longevity for virtually every PC made today.

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