Product Reviews

3ware has always been at the forefront of IDE RAID development. As a result, its controller cards offer as good a feature set as you'll find on most SCSI-based cards. The Escalade 3W-7500-4 is one of a family of four IDE cards offering two to 12 IDE interfaces. A key feature is that each interface is independent, allowing them to support hot-swap and hot-standby drives. You also get the full range of array support including RAID-5.

3ware's own custom processor uses two unique technologies to improve performance. DiskSwitch replaces the shared bus found in SCSI systems and provides a dedicated channel to each IDE drive, so no master and slave designations are required. RAID-1 mirrored arrays

3ware provides full Windows and Linux support, but it's never supported Novell. Installation is simple enough, although after struggling with the wide parallel ATA cables you'll start to see the benefits of Serial ATA. A simple BIOS screen allows you to create, delete, modify or rebuild arrays, plus you're able to add a hot-standby drive to an existing array. You can then load 3ware's 3DM software, which provides a good range of management tools.

It's here that you see how sophisticated 3ware products are compared with the rudimentary Promise controller used in the Rackservers.com RX1-2800D-120M (see p199). 3DM runs as a Windows service and allows the controller to be accessed locally and remotely via a web browser. You can check on controller and array status, displays alarms and warnings, and add or remove drives. It's also possible to schedule array rebuilds on a weekly basis and, if any member fails, the software can send an email alert to a single recipient.