The Promise controller is a host-based controller; that means that it's not hardware RAID but driver RAID; all work is done by the drivers.

The real RAID-controllers from promise are called SuperTrak, the FastTrak series are just normal SATA controllers with bootstrap support and RAID drivers; some like to call it Fake RAID.

Also, it might overwrite the last sector of each disk, causing your configuration to be gone. This can be prevented by creating partitions that leave some space at the end of each drive.

But if you want RAID5 on Windows, why not buy a reasonable controller like Highpoint RocketRAID 2310 or 2320. These have a PCI-express interface which is much much better than PCI which is what you're using now. And yes you need 64-bit LBA but so does the operating system! And Windows requires partitions on all volumes, and normal partitions have a 2TiB limitation. So you need the new GPT partitions which can be bigger. Not all Windows versions support these, i can't tell you which does since i'm mostly working with Linux+BSD.

If you can afford the RR23xx series you should have a controller that can be with you for a long time. Anything with PCI or even PCI-X is obsolete by todays and tomorrows standards. For PCI-X the biggest problem is the inability to move it to a newer PCIe motherboard. PCIe is clearly superior and should be used whenever performance is important.

enlightenment basically said it all...

Server 2003 supports GPT disks as does Vista and Server 2008 (none will use it as a boot drive unless you have an EFI bios though not sure what that Tyan is)

That Tyan has PCI-X which will give you a few more options for better RAID cards. although enlightenment is on the spot again as it wont really be transferable (although ive heard that most of these will work in ordinary PCI slot but will lower bandwidth when compared with the PCI-X). Basically if it doesnt have an XOR processor onboard its software RAID.

Got a 3T array out of 1Tx4 drives on WinXP 32 bit.