Internet News Internet Investing Internet Technology Windows Internet Tech. RAID has been implemented in high-end servers and workstations for some time, but was, until just recently, not viable for most. RAID is best described as a protocol, or system of using existing IDE or SCSI drives.
RAID uses additional hard disks to improve performance, add reliability, or both simultaneously.
A large part of making RAID affordable lies not only in reducing the cost of the controller itself, but also in making it compatible with less-expensive hard disks. SCSI RAID controllers have been available for some time, but most users cannot afford a single SCSI drive, let alone multiple drives. The next logical step in making RAID affordable would be an IDE RAID controller. With this in mind, Promise Technology last year introduced its FastTrak. Of course, it was bound not to be alone, and Iwill followed with sIDE RAID66, an UltraDMA-66 IDE RAID controller.