First Glance
Iwill has once again been one of the first on the market to show us the very latest in IDE RAID technology! The SIDE RAID 100 card shares many of the same features as its little brother the SIDE RAID 66. Running on the Highpoing HPT 370 chipset, it supports RAID levels 0, 1, and 0+1, and also a drive configuration with a funny name –JBOD (Just a bunch of drives). JOBD basically entails that you can either have up 4 drives connected to the controller and each can act as a separate disk. Or you can combine the storage of different sized disks into one drive letter (this is similar to drive volumes in Windows NT) but JOBD doesn’t provide speed or fault tolerance. One other feature supported by the SIDE RAID 100 is called drive sparing. Sparing is an extra unused drive in the disk subsystem usually in stand-by mode. It provides data fault tolerance by making the spare drive available if another drive in the system fails. The SIDE allows for two spare drives for transparent copying.
The package comes with a decent installation and RAID explained manual, two IDE 100 cables (just like IDE 66- 80 wire), and a driver on floppy disk. It’s a nicely rounded kit, and I like the fact they included two IDE 100 cables.
Installation
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| IWill Setup Screen |
As with other SCSI or IDE RAID cards you may be familiar with, all that needs to be done is connecting the card (in this case a PCI bus card) to the system board, and then connecting the drives you want to use (in our case two IBM Deskstar 7200 RPM drives). Then booting the OS and installing the correct driver. I used two different machine configurations to test this card –Windows 98se and Windows NT 4.0 with service pack 6a. In each boot after installing the card, a simple driver install went without problem, and then a quick system reboot allows you to start making use of the card. Iwill includes a very simplistic utility that allows you to view what devices are connected to the card and in what order. It doesn’t serve any other helpful diagnostic purposes such as administrative alerts if a drive should fail. But still... –it will let you peer into the card a little to glance at the connected drives and make sure they are functioning up to par.
When you're ready to setup your RAID, booting the system yields a post menu that auto-detects the drives connected to the SIDE card. By pressing CTRL+H, you will enter into the RAID setup menu. In this setup menu there are some simple to navigate menus that allow you to define what kind of RAID you wish to configure, and what drives are to be included. The user isn't able to tweak anything other than the block size which can be changed from 4K to 64K –this comes in real handy for someone who is wanting maximum throughput in a RAID 0 configuration.
I setup the first RAID as a Stripe set (RAID 0) using a block size of 64k. I found the navigation of the BIOS menu to be very painless and in fact a little too easy –if there is such a thing. Simply put, all that must be done is to pick the kind of array you want, the drives included, block size, and just click Create RAID. It’s slightly confusing after you do create the RAID array because the menu never actually informs you that it’s really created the set. This can be checked by simply hitting F1 which shows you the current configuration of the card and verifies that the RAID was created.
The second array I created was a mirror set (RAID1). The menus are as simple to navigate through when setting this array as with the RAID 0 configuration, although once you have selected the drives you are including in the set, you have to enter into another section of the SIDE BIOS to duplicate the source drive to the mirrored drive. BE PREPARED here! As with ANY mirror configuration –this takes a while! I used Two IBM Deskstar 20 gig ATA 100 drives and the mirror process took about 25 minutes.
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