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Fast Trak 66
by John Reynolds
 

Well, that depends. It's an interesting product because it's unique, and tempting because it seems to offer doubled drive performance over regular systems. Unfortunately, the card gave me a few problems while reinstalling Windows 98 once the two drives were striped together; the OS basically refused to boot until I removed everything else from the system except for the Fast Trak and the video card.

I could easily blame Microsoft's PnP panacea, but the card also hung the system when I attempted to install it in my pre-configured machine, forcing me to manually set aside a specific IRQ that wouldn't be shared with any other installed device. And I'm a bit worried about the card's inability to run certain benchmarks, though I tested its stability with hours of running the Quake 2 demos in a continuous loop. I'm happy to report that the system never locked or crashed.

In a final analysis, I wouldn't recommend the Fast Trak66 to the casual PC owner, or even to most gamers. It's costly when you factor in the expense of two good IDE drives on top of its MSRP of $150. Moreover, installation could very well become a nightmare, and while the transfer rates are phenomenal they equate to faster load times, but not faster gaming.

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WW2F
WW2 Fighters

Titles such as Unreal, Descent 3, and WW2 Fighters didn't show any performance increases from running on a striped drive array. So unless you're independently wealthy, ask yourself if shaving 8 or 9 seconds from your system's bootup or a few seconds from a game's load time is really worth the cost. And then go look at the online prices for a Celeron 466 or V3 2000.

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Last Updated July 8th, 1999

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