Fast and Inexpensive - Promise's FastTrak66 IDE RAID-Controller

The Benchmark Results - Transfer Rate Of ATA Stripe Sets

Looking at the single drive first shows the typical 'zoning' of a hard drive. In the outer area of the disk there are more sectors per track and so it transfers more data per rotation than in the inner tracks. IBM's Deskstar has obviously got 11 different zones.

The stripe of two hard drives doubles the bandwidth over the whole drive almost exactly, just as we would have expected it. FastTrak66 encounters problems however, once three of four fast drives are used for the array. You can see that only in the inner and slower zones a stripe set of three or four is supplying triple or quadruple the bandwidth. The faster zones are limited however, which is particularly strong in case of the stripe set of four.