IDE RAID Card Roundup - PAGE 13Richard Harris - Thursday, June 8th, 2000
Final Words
If performance is what your after, the Promise card or the Iwill card will both serve you well. Throughout each benchmark, both cards were very close in score, so close in fact you would have to look into other benefits of each card to decide which to buy.
The AMI falls too short in benchmarks to be recommend as a 1st pick performance choice.
If price is an issue the Iwill card has your number. It is around $20 cheaper than both the Promise or AMI, but you won’t get the ability to have 4 drives connected in a single RAID 0, and it suffers from a slight performance loss when compared to the Promise card. However you do get a 5-year warranty.
If fault tolerance or RAID 1 configuration is your target, than any of these card will work for you. In setup -there wasn’t any difference between the Promise, Iwill, or AMI, although the AMI card fell way behind in all benchmarks when running a RAID 1 configuration. I would just pick the cheapest card - in this case the Iwill.
IDE RAID is definitely gaining in popularity because of cards like the ones offered in this roundup. During the review of each of the cards included –my system was noticeably more responsive, and that alone proves to me that my next system is going to include an IDE RAID configuration - It’s a cheap alternative to high-end SCSI based solutions and it’s perfect for a someone who wants more performance or fault tolerance than their standard drive system can provide.