September 1998

DupliDisk PCI

ARCO Computer Products, Inc.
2750 North 29th Ave.
Hollywood, FL 33020
Ph.: 954-925-2688
Fx.: 954-925-2889
E-mail: [email protected]
www.arcoide.com

Price: $225 per card

RATINGS (0-5)
Installation: 5
Documentation: 4
Features: 4
GUI: 4
Overall: A

The wheels of time grind slowly, but when it comes to hard drives, time does not move slowly enough. It's a simple law of nature and physics that eventually all hard drives will fail. Your 150-page dissertation on "Why we shouldn't regulate Internet telephony" is gone. Your favorite screen-saver and wallpaper desktop -- gone. Endless hours of customizing Microsoft Word to your liking, as well as countless documents are now in "digital heaven" since your hard drive has failed.

You could of course restore from backup, but you still will have at least a couple hours of down time. In some instances, having a few hours downtime is not critical, but in many cases, downtime is to be avoided at all costs. For instance, ISPs, PC-PBXs, and to some extent, Internet telephony gateways all require nearly 100 percent uptime (though Internet telephony gateways usually have a PSTN fallback).

Traditionally RAID (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks) required the use of SCSI drives, which aren't all that inexpensive at all. Of course, that's changing somewhat, since a 4 gigabyte SCSI drive, which cost $1,200 a year and a half ago, now costs about $380.

Nevertheless, SCSI also often requires a separate SCSI controller (add another $250), which uses one of the available PCI slots, though some motherboards include a SCSI controller on-board. SCSI can also be a chore to set up, since it requires setting the termination power on each SCSI device, as well as selecting individual SCSI IDs for each device.

IDE drives are much cheaper than SCSI drives, and virtually all PCs manufactured today have two on-board IDE controllers. However, IDE has always been known for use in desktop PCs or even file/print servers, but never in any mission-critical applications, since mirroring traditionally had been SCSI's forte. That is until now -- Arco Computer Products manufactures an IDE-RAID 1 controller, which brings fault tolerance down to a reasonable cost utilizing truly inexpensive IDE hard drives. Arco's DupliDisk PCI controller is completely driverless, which mirrors data from up to two pairs of IDE, E-IDE, or U-IDE drives simultaneously. If one drive fails, the other immediately takes over. An alarm sounds to alert you that a drive has failed, but your system continues to operate normally. You can power down and replace the failed drive at your convenience.

DOCUMENTATION
The documentation was short and simple and easy to follow. This product does not require extensive documentation; thus we did not weigh the documentation very heavily in determining the overall grade of this product. The documentation consisted of a pamphlet with step-by-step instructions for mirroring two drives. The documentation also included a detailed description of each of the features, what the LEDs meant, as well as how to recover from a drive failure. Also included was an important installation note, which warned that you must use the included IDE cables, or the mirroring would not work. This is certainly useful to prevent those "eager beavers" that don't read the manuals from installing the product improperly. Overall, for such short documentation, it was still pretty informative, earning a solid 4 rating.

INSTALLATION/OPERATIONAL TESTING
Installation of the Arco product was a snap. All we had to do was disconnect the IDE cable on the computer from the hard drive as well as the motherboard. Next, we installed the DupliDisk card into one of the PCI slots. Three special IDE cables - provided by Arco Computer Products - were labeled Primary, Mirrored, and Host. The primary cable was hooked into our "primary" drive, which was a Maxtor 7.1 GB drive. Likewise, the mirrored cable was installed into the drive, which was going to act as the "mirror" to the primary drive. This mirrored drive was a Maxtor 7.1 GB drive as well, though we could have used a different brand, model, and size, as long as the mirror was equal or greater in size to the primary drive being mirrored. Finally, the host cable was hooked into the motherboard's primary IDE channel, since the DupliDisk uses the onboard IDE controller for transmitting data from the drives to the motherboard/CPU.

Next, we booted off of a bootable disk since neither of our 7.1 GB drives were partitioned or formatted yet. We should mention that we could have used a drive with existing data on it, and then mirrored the drive. We put the software disk in the floppy drive and ran a program called "acp.exe." The program then prompted us, asking if we wished to mirror the drives.

Some features of the "acp" program include drive copying (sector by sector), mirroring, un-mirroring, checking the status of the drives, and other capabilities. The ACP GUI was pretty user-friendly, considering it was a DOS program. We had no problem figuring out what each menu option's function was used for. We mirrored the drives, and then rebooted.

We installed Windows 98 on the computer's hard drive, which was then mirrored to the secondary drive. Then, while the computer was on, we disconnected the primary drive to simulate a hard drive failure. We then attempted to see if we could perform some file copying from Explorer, as well as using the DOS "dir" command. The system did not skip a beat, as the files could be read and written without a problem. The "mirror" had done its job!

FEATURES
DupliDisk requires no TSRs, jumpers, interrupts, or device drivers, which traditionally have hampered performance. Also, because compatibility with the DupliDisk-PCI is established at the original IDE connection, it is essentially operating system independent. It can be installed in systems running Windows 95, Windows NT, Windows 3.x, OS/2, DOS, Unix, Linux, and NetWare, as well as others. The DupliDisk also features POST (Power On Self-Test) beeps to indicate if there is a problem, as well as green and red LEDs to visually inspect if there is a problem. DupliDisk supports 2 pairs of mirrored drives (master/slave), supporting IDE, E-IDE, and U-IDE. This product also allows you to set "reads" to toggle between the two drives, which can extend the life of each hard drive.

ROOM FOR IMPROVEMENT
We'd like to see them bundle a Windows-based utility for monitoring the performance or throughput of each drive, or perhaps display some other drive-related statistics. If a drive is having read or write problems (bad sectors), some sort of software indication would also be useful.

CONCLUSION
This is a very cost-effective alternative to SCSI RAID solutions. No more futzing with SCSI IDs or termination power hassles! This product is perfect for the ISP market, where uptime is critical, as well as PC-PBXs, PC-based Internet telephony gateways, CTI servers, and cost-conscious companies looking for a dependable file server. TMC Labs was very impressed with the ease of installation, flawless performance, and the price tag of DupliDisk.