User Guide

Back to Contents Page

Using Your FastTrak100 Card: FastTrak100™ Ultra ATA/100 RAID Card User's Guide

General

General Usage

If FastTrak100 was installed by Dell, your PC currently houses two high performance Ultra ATA/100 drives that are either "striped" together or are "mirrored." Striping (RAID 0) produces increased performance and large storage capacity when using more than one drive. Mirroring (RAID 1) provides continuous data protection. In either case, FastTrak100 fully supports Ultra ATA/100 specification of up to 100 MB/sec data transfers per drive, depending on individual drive specifications.

Under striping, the FastTrak100 can join two drives to create a huge "virtual" drive as seen by your Dell PC. When data is either saved or retrieved from the drives, FastTrak100 sends or gets data simultaneously from both drives in parallel, virtually doubling their sustained data transfer rate and decreasing load times for files. The other option is the mirroring (RAID 1) feature.

Mirroring creates a continuous backup of your files on to an identical second drive and maintains both drives every time the user saves. If, in the unlikely event that one drive should fail, FastTrak100 maintains your existing data on the remaining working drive and allows you to continue using your PC normally. When you eventually shut your system down and replace the failed drive, FastTrak100 automatically rebuilds your data. Such fault tolerant, data redundancy is excellent for high-end desktop PC users wanting to continually protect valuable data on their PC.

Back to Contents Page