The Storage Champions: ATA/100 IDE RAID Controllers From AMI, HighPoint And Promise

AMI / LSI Logic MegaRAID IDE 100

On September 4, the controller division from American Megatrends, Inc. was sold to LSI Logic. Products and support are kept up without interruption. LSI Logic can be reached at http://www.megaraid.lsilogic.com .

The MegaRAID IDE 100 controller targets desktop computers, workstations and entry-level servers. As most IDE RAID controllers, it does not actually support RAID levels 3 and 5, which are considered the only true RAID modes. Instead, the MegaRAID supports striping (RAID 0), mirroring (RAID 1) or a combination of both (RAID 0+1).

The package includes a small manual, two 80-pin IDE cables and both a driver disk and utility CD. If you want to upgrade to Windows XP soon, you might be delighted to hear that Microsoft supports this controller by default.

Highpoint HPT370A

The HPT370 is one of the most popular IDE RAID controllers. It is widely used on higher-end motherboards from most manufacturers, as it is easy to integrate and can be used for RAID arrays and also as a standard ATA/100 IDE controller. While the system boots, the controller BIOS displays drive status information. Pressing CTRL+H, you will enter the setup menu, which is very clearly structured. Here you may setup a drive array: with two hard drives, you can chose betreen striping (RAID 0) and mirroring (RAID 1). Three hard drives can only be spanned or striped, while four can either be spanned, striped, or striped and mirrored (RAID 0+1). Choosing RAID 1 requires the drives to be synchronized, which took approximately 20 minutes with our 30 GB IBM DTLA drives.