Conclusion
It's a pity that the backplane from Adaptec only comes with the company's own RAID controller as this combination is simply too extravagant for many uses and is hardly a bargain at $600. But this backplane leaves by far the best impression when it comes to quality. You can tell from the product that the company has a lot of storage know-how and experience, which is what leads us to place it solidly in a league with popular SCSI products.
The two rivals are somewhere lower on the quality scale, and are inexpensive. Addonics offers the Disk Array 4SA for as little as $149, and if you want, with the appropriate Serial ATA adapter. The ADST114, as it's called, is a 32 bit model with support for RAID 0, 1 and 0+1. Addonics unfortunately won't say another word about its chipset, but it is the Sil3114 from Silicon Image. The $199 price tag for the entire package can thus certainly be considered good.
Promise takes a different tack - the SuperSwap 4100 is the most modest device in the test. However, we weren't able to find out the price, because the unit is not yet available in stores. We're assuming, however, that the price will also be somewhere between $130 - $150; the manufacturer should not ask more than that, since the SuperSwap 4100 does not always meet professional standards.
