Written
: 7/20/2000The Iwill SIDE-RAID66 is an IDE RAID card featuring a HighPoint HPT368 ATA6 RAID controller chip, two independent IDE channels, support for Ultra DMA/66, DMA/33 and all PIO modes, 32bit/33Mhz PCI Bus Master interface and concurrent PIO and bus master access. We'll get to what all this means in a bit.
RAID for those who don't know, stands for Redundant Array Inexpensive Disks or Redundant Array of Independent Disk, depending on which text book you read. RAID was once used only for high end SCSI systems but with the introduction of the new HighPoint HPT368 controller chip it has found its way into the IDE arena.
What RAID does is offer your system faster hard drive speed, better safeguard of mission critical data or both. It does this by taking two or more hard drives and linking them together as either a mirrored or striped pair or a combination of both.
The Iwill SIDE-RAID66 comes with everything you need to setup a RAID 0, RAID 1 or RAID 0+1 system. Everything except the extra hard drives. The card can fit into any PCI slot and there is even an external hard drive connector to plug in an outboard hard drive. The unit comes with two ATA/66 cable and all the needed software to install it with most operating systems.
The layout of the board is a bit of a bother. I wish Iwill would have made both IDE ports come out the side edge. As it stands, I had to do some creative bending of the ATA/66 cables to keep a nice clean look after the installation.
While the SIDE-RAID66 is a RAID card, you don't have to use it as such. It will work fine with one or more hard drives in a non RAID setup. Seeing that the card doesn't cost much more than an ATA/66 add on card, this is a good way to get ATA/66 support (with a RAID option) if your computer doesn't have it.