Not wanting to give up my FastTrack SX4000

So I've got this server I decommissioned and in it was a FastTrack SX4000 lite. Great four channel RAID adapter with XOR support. Problem is, it's PATA. The largest PATA drive I can find on Newegg is 500GB, which is great, but the product page states the max drive size is 250GB, or a max if 1TB for the array. Can anyone think of a reason the adapter wouldn't support 500GB drives for a total of 2TB (1.5TB actually since I wanna do RAID5). It can't be a 32 bit LBA since it supports drives larger than 137GB.

I really don't want to give this thing up. Thoughts? I've put an email into Promise, but I don't expect much more than a canned response. From what I hear, Promise doesn't give two squirts of piss about their discontinued items.

The 'supported' max size might have been based on the largest drives available at the time; or it might be an actual limitation of the hardware or RAID software. I can't really say.

Yeah, I just don't want to buy four 500GB drives and have the damn thing not work.

benutne said:

Yeah, I just don't want to buy four 500GB drives and have the damn thing not work.

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Personally, I wouldn't risk it. It's an old card anyway; maybe it was time for retirement (and an excuse for an upgrade!).

I have fond memories of that card. I remember back in college when I felt like the man with my 330ish GB Raid-5 array (4x120s). I craigslisted that card about a year ago for like 30 dollars... SATA seems to be the wave of the future now I am afraid...