User manual

FastTrak TX2000™ Series User Manual

Mirroring (RAID 1)

Writes duplicate data on to a pair of drives while reads are performed in parallel. ATA RAID 1 is

fault tolerant because each drive of a mirrored pair is installed on separate IDE channels. If one

of the mirrored drives suffers a mechanical failure (e.g. spindle failure) or does not respond, the

remaining drive will continue to function. This is called Fault Tolerance. If one drive has a

physical sector error, the mirrored drive will continue to function.

RAID 1 (Mirroring)

On the next reboot, the FastBuild

utility will display an error in the array and recommend to

replace the failed drive. Users may choose to continue using their PC, however Promise

recommends replacing the failed drive as soon as possible. See page 27, “Rebuilding A

Mirrored Array”, for a functional description.

Due to redundancy, the drive capacity of the array is half the total drive capacity. For example,

two 100 GB drives that have a combined capacity of 200 GB would have 100 GB of usable

storage. With drives of different capacities, there may be unused capacity on the larger drive.

Using a Spare Drive

Under a RAID 1 setup, an extra “hot spare” drive (a third drive on FastTrak TX2000) can be

attached to the FastTrak TX2000 and not assigned to the array. Such a drive will be activated

to replace a failed drive that is part of a mirrored array. A rebuild is performed automatically in

the background to mirror the good drive data on to the spare.

At a later time, the system can be powered off and the failed drive can be physically removed

and replaced. Spare drives must be the same or larger capacity than the smallest array

member.

NOTE: Due to IDE limitations when drives are in a Master/Slave configuration, if the drive that

fails is on the same channel as the “spare” drive, there is a possibility that the “spare” drive will

fail to be recognized by the system.

Striping/Mirror (RAID 0+1)

A combination of both above array types. It can increase performance by reading and writing

data in parallel while protecting data with duplication. A minimum of four drives needs to be