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Promise SuperTrak EX STEX8650 8-port SAS Author: Cameron Johnson SUMMARY: We compare Promise’s SAS controller against the more common onboard SATA RAID of today to see if there are yields. Editor: Steve Dougherty Category: Storage Published: 5th February 2008 Manufacturer: Promise Our Rating: 90% Rate our Content Now! Package and Contents This is the first Promise controller we have received from the company; previously we have dealt with onboard controller chips on motherboards, and with the cheaper JMicron chips around you don’t see many of their chips on motherboards these days. The SuperTrak EX comes to us in a green and white with blue tinge box. Green and white is the staple colour for Promise. The front of the box has a full colour photo of the controller card which is good to see, as well as the model number and company logo. The back of the box contains marketing info on the board in just about all of the major language groups, meaning this product gets shipped to just about any country that needs a high performance SAS controller card. Promise includes a user manual that covers all of the major language groups that the controller card is going to be sold in, as well as a quick start manual and a Driver CD. Promise provides Microsoft Windows XP (32 and 64-bit versions), Windows 2003 server, Windows Vista (32 and 64-bit versions) along with quite a few Linux distribution drivers. Rather than using eight separate cables to the drives, Promise uses MiniSAS cables; two of these are included, and each cable supports four drives. The cables are designed to go to internal enclosures or repeaters. Page 2 of 9 Quick Navigation - Jump To Page Page 1 [Introduction] Page 2 [The Box and What’s Inside] Page 3 [The Controller] Page 4 [Test System Setup and HD Tach] Page 5 [Benchmarks – HD Speed] Page 6 [Benchmarks – DiskSpeed32] Page 7 [Benchmarks – HD Tune] Page 8 [Benchmarks – Adobe Premiere Elements 3.0] Page 9 [Final Thoughts] Talk about "Promise SuperTrak EX STEX8650 8-port SAS" in our forum!