Promise SX6000 awesome for critical data storage
Written: May 29 '02
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Product Rating:
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Pros: security, speed, price of card
Cons: price of drives, heat, linux documentation is TERRIBLE
The Bottom Line: I bought the SX6000 (regular) non-pro and have had great experience with it in a WINDOWS2000 environment (LINUX is horrible, and non-functional as of 5/1/02
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| syzx's Full Review: Promise Technology I P29STS620000000 SUPERTRAK SX6... |
Like taking those digital photos with your two or three cameras?
Got a video camcorder and have you purchased the Pinnacle card and use Pinnacle DV Studio to do editing?
How about your many versions of your resume that you really don’t want to lose?
Perhaps you spent hours ripping your CDs into MP3 format so that you could mix your own CDs – WAV or not.
Me, the birth of my boy was instrumental in the amount of digital images (an obsolete Kodak DC280 which still works great, as well as a Sony DCR TRV30
So, as Fry’s didn’t carry it … I bought it online at one of the places that seemed reputable … spending about $250 delivered (to San Jose, CA).
I ran up to Fry’s though – what a HORRIBLE place that is (a) inexpensive (b) recently staffed with slightly more motivated but inexperienced personnel – and bought 6x Maxtor DiamondMax 80 Gb EIDE drives [ computers.cnet.com/hardware/0-1092-404-7102093.html?tag=st.sh.9717386-311-7102093.dir.productinfo ] … I bought 6 because due to the ‘magic’ of RAID (which is Redundant Array of Independent (and Inexpensive) Disks) I decided on a RAID 5 configuration [ www.webopedia.com/TERM/R/RAID.html] which means that I can have any ONE of the 6 drives fail … and I won’t lose my data. [BTW, 6 drives x 80 GB at RAID 5 is = 400GB of data … as one of the drives is used for the parity bit …. See this site and the user manual for more information … or email me and I’ll update this section if there is need. www.acnc.com/04_01_05.html
Think about that – losing your data. And I’m not talking about a 100 MB file…. How about when you have so much data that burning it regularly to CDs is a NIGHTMARE? (One video can be 4 GB…. Especially with heavy mixing). Yes, I could write it back to tape … but every time? And yes, I could, I suppose, save a MASSIVE 3GB zip file … change it to a MPEG extension and save it to my camcorder … but THIS SOLUTION IS COOLER!
So… until I buy my first DVD writer, this is my solution (and, I can justify it as I work from home too).
So, having installed the Promise SX6000 Card, I physically installed the 6 HDDs … and hooked them up.
Then, on boot of my Windows 2000 Professional, 1.4ghz CPU, 500mhz RAM box, I was brought into the Promise Raid Array configuration tool – www.promise.com - and go to the support section … you can see that they’ve updated the drivers a few times (the Linux drivers didn’t work a month ago, and the documentation was literally NON EXISTENT; I know because my machine has swappable OS hard drives, and I’ve formatted the RAID array (which is a NONBOOTABLE array by choice … yes, you can make it a bootable array if you choose) … I’ve formatted the array as a FAT array so that I can - hopefully – use LINUX to access some of the data.
A note about support –it’s FANTASTIC (usually). I called to get Linux info, and while they couldn’t help me … the work is done overseas blah blah blah … they were friendly and knowledgeable … oh, and did I mention FREE!
EIDE RAID 5 is something that is quite unique, and has amazing effects on disk read/write speeds, and until writable DVDs are common (and cheap) … and by then we’ll be recording straight from the TV … so the space will be needed … this is the best solution.
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
syzx
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Location: Taichung, Taiwan
Reviews written: 6
Trusted by: 0 members
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