X-bit labs

HighPoint RocketRAID 2320 Controller Review

Category: Storage

by Alexander Yuriev , Nikita Nikolaichev

[ 02/24/2006 | 11:53 PM ]

Today we are going to introduce to you a hardware RAID 5 controller from HighPoint that supports SATA-II and SATA150 hard disk drive, advanced PCI-Express interface, both command queuing technologies, such as TCQ and NCQ. This controller demonstrated pretty good scalability and high performance in our tests. Read more in our review!

Table of contents:

• Closer Look
  
• Testbed and Methods
  
• Performance in Intel IOMeter DataBase Pattern
  
• Performance in Intel IOMeter Sequential Read and Write Patterns
  
• Performance in Intel IOMeter Fileserver and Webserver Patterns
  
• Performance in Intel IOMeter WorkStation Pattern
  
• Performance during Multi-Threaded Writing / Reading
  
• Performance in FC-Test
  
• NTFS File System
  
• FAT32 File System
  
• Linear Read Speed
  
• Conclusion
  

It looks like we haven’t had any reviews of HighPoint controller cards on our site for quite some time now. We decided to correct this mistake, especially since we managed to get our hands on a new and very interesting product from this manufacturer.

After long-term and not very successful experiments with the software RAID 5 implementation, HighPoint Company managed to catch up with its competitors in one big jump having launched the product that represented a great combination of the today’s latest technologies.

Closer Look

RocketRAID 2320 controller from HighPoint supports 8 SATA-II HDDs (of course it will also work perfectly well with SATA150 HDDs). It allows building the arrays of the following types: RAID 0, 1, 5, 10 and JBOD. The controller supports the today’s most advanced interface – PCI E x4.

Thanks to the 64-bit LBA addressing support, RocketRAID 2320 controller allows creating arrays with the capacity over 2TB. Moreover, it can work with both command queuing technologies, such as TCQ and NCQ.

The controller is shipped in a light-blue box:

The controller itself is designed as a low-profile card. To reduce its height, HighPoint installed SATA connectors in two rows and two layers. XOR processor is hidden under the heatsink, which looks very impressive on a small PCB like this. PCI Express x4 connector allows installing this controller card into PCI-E x8 and x16 slots.

Besides the controller card itself, the box also contains a low-profile bracket, a cable for RocketGuard100 monitoring card, corresponding software, 8 SATA cables of HighPoint’s traditional blue color and a user’s guide.

RocketRAID 2320 controller is claimed to support the following operating systems:

• Windows
• Windows X64 Editions
• Linux (opensource)
• FreeBSD (opensource)
• Mac OS X

You can download all the latest driver versions from the manufacturer’s web-site .