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Pastimes : Dream Machine ( Build your own PC )

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To: LTBH who wrote (820)	5/30/1998 5:20:00 PM
From: Zeuspaul	Read Replies (3) of 14778

IDE RAID..Backup..BIOS boot sequence This is a post I found in the storage forum at Tom's Hardware Guide tomshardware.com From:(DRWHOM) To:(BOBBYKYW) 2 of 7 Posted: 5/17/98 5:52:00 PM I have a promise fasttrak ide raid card in my system now. There are 4 ultra dma drives running off it. The card is very stable with an excellent bios which identifies the drives during boot up. The bios setup allows me to change which drive is the boot drive without going into the hardware at all. The card has the capability of "mirroring" ie. duplicating exactly the programs and data of any existing drive to another drive of equal or greater size very quickly. I use it to duplicate my complete "C" drive before I attempt any tinkering with the operating system or major drivers. Recently I "mirrored" the entire 3.7 gig contents of the "C" drive effortlessly in about 20 minutes. When I was done this mirrored "E" drive was an exact copy of my "C" drive. By going into the promise bios setup during bootup I made this "E" drive the boot drive and thus was able to experiment away to my hearts content knowing that if I was to have a problem I could simply change the bootable drive(using the bios) back the way it was and be back in business. I plan to do this again just before I install windows 98! The card only supports eide and ultra dma drives though. If your drives are standard ide drives it will not function. As far as performance increases go, I must say that after exhaustive testing I have found very little real world improvement. My Winbench 98 tests under the various different raid configurations of striped and/or mirrored arrays has been very inconclusive and not showed any definitive improvement over the promise ultra 33 card that came with the machine. Nevertheless the configuration control available through the bios setup is so terrific I would not trade the card for anything.

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