RAID

Creating a RAID array with the Promise chip is incredibly easy. Unplug the board, move the jumpers to the south of the chip to the "RAID" position, and install two hard drives on the Promise IDE ports. Boot back up, and be sure to enable the "ATA100/RAID" controller in the BIOS if you'd disabled it. At the next screen, you will be prompted to press Ctrl+F to set up the array. The chip detected my drives without a problem. (In this case, I was using two 30GB ATA100 5,400RPM Quantum Fireballs.) I choose "Auto Setup," and the next thing I knew, it was finished.

Creating a RAID array with the Promise chip is incredibly easy, but getting Windows to recognize the RAID is a little trickier. I was able to create RAIDs with both drives set as the masters on the two ports, with both drives set as the slaves on the two ports, and with one drive as master and one drive as slave on the primary port. But Windows 2000 would not recognize any of these. Again, more bugginess with the IDE ports: the only configuration that Windows would recognize was with the drives as master and slave on the same cable attached to the secondary Promise port.

Here's how the RAID fared with the Sandra hard drive test:

That number of 26686 would lead you to believe the RAID performed 25% better than the ATA100 alone, but look at the HD Tach results:

This shows great variance in the sequential read speed across the drive, though it did often hit the 35,000 level. However, both the random access time and the read burst speeds are much worse than with either the 686B or the Promise's ATA100. For me, the jury is still out on IDE RAID.