The 4-port Promise SATA300 TX4 SATA controller offers a low-cost solution for connecting up to four of the latest, high-performance SATA 3Gb/s disk drives to PC motherboards with a PCI interface. While drive capabilities continue to advance at a fast rate, the vast majority of available motherboards still use the PCI interface to connect peripheral devices. With the SATA300 TX4, users can benefit from a flexible solution that connects the most advanced drives to their existing system, the ideal future-proofing upgrade. While storage system performance is affected by components throughout the storage system, SATA drives with 3Gb/s can deliver significantly faster burst data throughput. Like a faster data cache, the faster burst rate when using the latest 3Gb/s drives should provide a snappier feel when opening small files and conducting the day-to-day tasks that many desktop and workstation PCs are required to perform. The controller supports Serial ATA 3Gb/s drives and conforms to Serial ATA II, Extensions to Serial ATA 1.0a specification. This support also includes Native Command Queuing and Disk Activity LED headers support. In addition to Native Command Queuing, the controller also supports Tagged Command Queuing with drives that can take advantage of this capability. Command Queuing increases I/O performance by intelligently reordering data requests so that the data can be more quickly accessed than if the commands werent ordered. The low-profile form factor SATA300 TX4 PCI adapter incorporates many of Promise Technologys advanced host bus adapter features. The 66MHz PCI bus supports up to 266MB/sec burst data transfer rate. The SATA300 TX4 also includes large LBA support for drives above 137GB, and its onboard BIOS automatically identifies and configures drive type. The controller supports up to two controllers in the same system.
