Promising Technology in the Horizon

There were only a handful of new technologies on display at Computex this year as there were not many announcements made during this period. Of course, we did managed to catch a couple of interesting displays which we think is worth mentioning in this next Computex 2003 update.

One of which is from Promise Technology, the blokes who gave us PCI and on-board storage controller solutions ranging from ATA-133 to SATA controllers. Well, they have released a couple of SATA products already but it seems that they are continuing their focus in this market as they believe it would continue to grow in the future.

The display that immediately caught our attention was their next generation SATA II demonstration. In the demo, they showed how the next SATA II specification could support a port multiplier. Note that the SATA II specification has nothing to do with the next generation of SATA devices which operates at 3Gbps although it will include second generation SATA devices. Instead, the SATA II specification is an extension of the current SATA specifications to include technologies such as port multiplier and port selector.

Basically, the port multiplier allows one to use one SATA link to connect to more than one device. In the demonstration, Promise Technology showed us how their SATA controller could support this new SATA II specification using an experimental port multiplier. Once connected, the host adapter would see all the four drives connected to the controller - appearing in the system as four individual drives.

A port multiplier demo using one of Promise's latest SATA II compliant controller.

Promise Technology also showcased an upcoming 8-port PCI-X SATA controller as well as a 4-port RAID 5 capable 66MHz PCI SATA controller. Their RAID 5 solution utilizes their own processor with Promise's self-developed XOR engine for parity calculations. According to Promise, their technology is unlike other RAID 5 cards which requires third-party processors to perform all the parity calculations. They believe that their solution is more cost effective and efficient as it's developed specifically for that purpose. The Fastrak S150 SX4 comes with a DIMM slot which allows one to add up to 256MB of cache.

An upcoming Promise Technology PCI-X 8-port SATA II-150 RAID controller based on the PDC81519 controller.

Promise's FastTrak S150 SX4 SATA controller with their own RAID 5 XOR engine.

Promise also introduced a new NAS device which comes in a fancy designed box which supports a single SATA or parallel ATA drive. Within the box is a Toshiba 4927 200MHz processor which handles all the administration, user interface and file sharing platform. The ConnecStor NS-1100 supports various file sharing via Windows, Mac OS, FTP, NFS and WebHD.

The Promise ConnectStor NS-1100 single bay network attached storage (NAS) for the SOHO and home.