Promise Fasttrak s150 sx4 Upgrade path

[kris17]

Rip Van Winkle here:

I proudly kept my last system alive for 7 yrs. Now that I'm upgrading I'm finding that EVERYTHING in the old system is not supported by win7 including my old drive array.

Is there an upgrade path for the Promise Fasttrak s150 where I just unclick the drives from the old controller and reclick them to the new? Prob not right? Looks like I'll be buying new...

Just thought I'd ask.

You can also kibitz on the new raid controller. I need 2TB for storage. Sure, sure, since its raining money I'll upgrade the drives to SATAII.

Thanks in advance.

 

[WyomingKnott]

A few suggestions.

First, you could read this: http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/196922-32-switching-storage-controllers-reinstalling-windows . It's a stickied article on switching RAID controllers.

Second, that's a PCI card, and many modern motherboards support PCI slots. In theory, you can plop it down into a new machine and have it run. It might be slow compared to a single SATA drive, though.

Third, as I said above, a PCI card might be slower than using the SATA II ports; PCI is pretty slow these days.

Some questions so that I can give a better answer: Why are you using RAID? If you are using it to increase capacity, there are 3 TB drives now. If you are using RAID1 or 5 or 6 or something to improve reliability, you can use this nifty device that FireWire2 has used with 40 TB of storage (well, he has four of them): http://www.datoptic.com/esata-hardware-raid-controller.html . I think that that's the link to the external version, there is an internal version. It will RAID up to five drives and plug into a single SATA II port on your mobo.

If, however, you are using RAID for speed, then you have to look at either a more expensive card (see Tom's recent article on the 3 GB/sec project) or a ginormous SSD.

So, what is your goal here?

 

[kris17]

I need redundancy and portability. I like internal because I run a quiet pc.

I cannot just move the promise card because there are no drivers for Win7.

I have the Highpoint Rocketraid 2320 in my shopping cart but now I've got cold feet. Apparently the support is nonexistent. I've looked at Adaptec (used in the past) and they seem expensive and LCI, could be a contender.

$150 - $200 feels right though I'd go up to $300. I've already bought 4 1TB SATA 600 drives.

What to do what to do...

 

[WyomingKnott]

$150 - $200 feels right though I'd go up to $300. I've already bought 4 1TB SATA 600 drives.

What to do what to do...

Get the Datoptic thingy then. It's under $200. Your feet will be nice and warm.

 

[kris17]

I went super high end and bought the Areca. Support, reliability and longevity proved to be the key determinants.
Thx.

 

[kris17]

Best answer selected by Kris17.