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The first practical advantage is clear even on installation: the NetCell controllers work in all recent Windows operating systems without their own drivers! This is possible because the NetCell chip passes itself off as a standard IDE controller. In practice, that means:
A NetCell controller can be installed in almost any Windows system without any effort because the drivers are present in any case.
Driver updates are not necessary.
Windows NT, 2000, XP or 2003 can be installed without the unnecessary bother of getting a driver diskette for a controller that is not supported.
Even downgrading the IDE controller of the Southbridge to a secondary device and running a NetCell chip as a primary device with RAID XL is conceivable.
Although NetCell needs drivers for Linux and Macs, according to its own information they are already available.
In fast read mode NetCell knows how to switch off the parity check when reading; the RAID XL array is then read like a RAID 0.
Patrick Schmid was the editor-in-chief for Tom's Hardware from 2005 to 2006. He wrote numerous articles on a wide range of hardware topics, including storage, CPUs, and system builds.
