User`s manual

2
Introduction
What is Promise 20276 RAID controller?
The Promise 20276 RAID controller provides a cost-effective, high performance RAID
solution that adds performance and/or reliability to PC desktops and/or servers using Ultra
ATA/133, Ultra ATA/100 or Ultra ATA/66. It supports striping (RAID 0) or mirroring (RAID 1)
for master only.
With striping, identical drives can read and write data in parallel to increase performance.
Mirroring increases read performance through load balancing and elevator sorting while
creating a complete backup of your files.
A striped array doubles the sustained data transfer rate of Ultra ATA/133 drives. It fully
supports Ultra ATA/133 specification of up to 133 MB/sec per drive, depending on individual
drive specifications.
The Promise 20276 RAID controller also offers fault tolerant, data redundancy for entry-level
network file servers or simply for desktop PC users wanting to continually protect valuable
data on their PC. It offers RAID 1 mirroring (for two drives) to protect data. Should a drive that
is part of a mirrored array fail, it uses the mirrored drive (which contains identical data) to
assume all data handling. When a new replacement drive is later installed, it rebuilds data to
the new drive from the mirrored drive to restore fault tolerance.
The Promise 20276 RAID controller’s bootable BIOS supports individual drives larger than
128GB. With FAT32 and NTFS partitioning, the array can be addressed as one large single
volume.
Only connect IDE hard drives to the RAID IDE connectors on the system board. Hard drives
must be Ultra ATA/100, Ultra ATA/66, Ultra ATA/33, EIDE and/or Fast ATA-2 compatible.