It’s RAID night in storageland, and have we got a unique take on it for you, thanks to HighPoint's latest effort.
RAID cards are somewhat of a curiosity for most users, and it's not a stretch to see why - look at most motherboards on the market today and you'll be greeted with more SATA2.0 ports than seems useful in most cases, and more recently, even a handful of SATA3.0 ports will make a showing. However rarely, there are times that you'll need more of something: whether that be more speed, more capacity, or more reliability. This card boasts the ability to grant these at a cost of $200. We asked the question - is it worth it?
On paper the RocketRAID certainly seems solid, offering two Marvell 88SE9128 SATA3.0 controllers that are piped directly into the PCIe bus via a PLX bridge chip. These controllers each have two ports, with four cables supplied, though up to twenty drives can be connected thanks to the inbuilt port multiplier which does for SATA what a USB hub does for external devices. While total bandwidth is still limited to 6Gbps, or 600MB/s, this is enough for six mechanical drives before it becomes saturated, and it can auto-manage RAID in hardware if drives develop faults.
To test its speed we connected a single OCZ Vertex 2 SSD, and though it runs on SATA2.0, the drive still returned lower-than-expected average reads of 200.3MB/s, with a burst of 255.5MB/s, representing a drop of 30MB/s compared to a standard Intel ICHR10 southbridge. We threw another Vertex 2 at it in RAID0 and results were more impressive, returning an average of 261.0MB/s reads with a burst of 368MB/s - this time 30MB/s [i]higher[/i] than a single drive.
This card wasn't designed for such a small amount of drives however, and though we don't have the volume of rotational media on-hand to test its full capacity (nor any SATA3.0 SSDs), this is a decent card that offers a lot of flexibility to the insane storage-hungry enthusiast.
Issue: 137 | June, 2012