After having my 3 months young Samung SATA disk crash, and spending (WASTING!) considerable time recovering from old backups, old disks etc.etc. I came to the conclusion that my workstation needs a pro-like storage sub system.

Of course I have TWO RAID1 controllers on my ASUS P4e800 board - but both of them simply suck. Windows setup simply blue screens when accessing such a device via the one controller (Promise SATA controller with SATA RAID option)... the second controller (INTEL ICH5 RAID!) does not even have a "clone" function to make a good RAID1 array from a single "good" system disk... cheap add-ons for people that never intend to use it... altough it's an INTEL brand hardware, I would never recommend anyone relying on that built in crap... if you already hassle around that much for setup - can you imagine a recovery scenario?

I need to setup a RAID5 array which should enable me to have safe functionality as long as only 1 disk fails at the cost of only 1/3 ... and a third of 200 GB x 3 is still a 200 GB disk :-)

My hardware dealer suggested the controller FastTrak S150 SX4 a pretty low-cost, but full features RAID5 SATA controller...

Important features per homepage

• Four-port Serial ATA RAID controller with 1.5Gbps per channel
• 32-Bit/66MHz PCI 2.2 interface
• Support for RAID level 0, 1, 10, 5 and JBOD
• Online array expansion and RAID level migration to add capacity on the fly
• Supports hot swap of failed drives
• Automatic/manual rebuild of hot spare drive
• Variable stripe block size support enables optimization for diverse application requirements
• Promise RAID Processor with XOR engine for RAID parity calculations
• Supports up to 256MB of SDRAM memory in a 168-pin DIMM slot supports up to 256MB of ECC
• Seamless upgrade to Promise's external storage solutions (have to look at those as well...
• FRAM for RAID5 transaction log to avoid data corruption in the event of application hang ... FRAM is Ferroelectric RAM - said to be 20,000 times faster than flash memory and costs 25% less than battery-backed SRAM... means this should keep everything consistent