IDE RAID controller

SMARAID is a PCI ultraATA RAID controller card for IDE hard drives. It supports RAID levels 0 and 1, which are disk striping and mirroring respectively. The former is used for boosting the performance, while the latter to add

redundancy to prevent data loss. It has two IDE channels that support up to the UltraATA/100 specification. It also supports UDMA 5/4/3/2/1, hot swap of failed drive (RAID 1).

This card has a multi-boot option, which allows users to select the array to boot from. The card comes with drivers for all Windows OSs, including Win 98, Me, NT, 2000 and XP. The RAID configurations are done through the card’s BIOS, which is pretty easy to use. The card, too, is easy to install. It’s a PCI card with two IDE channels, to which you have to connect your hard drives. 

We tested the card for both the RAID levels it supports. As RAID 0 is meant for performance, we ran Winbench’s disk I/O test on it. With RAID 0, it gave a raw transfer rate of up to 44 MBps, compared to a transfer rate of 33.6 MBps produced by a single drive. To test RAID level 1, which does disk mirroring to prevent data loss, we crashed one of the drives that was running a Win 2000 Server. We removed this drive and replaced it with another one. Once this is done, the RAID 1 level has to be recreated from its BIOS, after which it automatically rebuilds the primary hard disk from the second one. 

The bottom line A good choice for those who can’t afford a SCSI RAID system. 

Sanjay Majumder at PCQ Labs