HighPoint External RAID

INTRODUCTION

RAID, a Redundant Array of Independent Drives (or Disks), also known as Redundant Array of Inexpensive Drives (or Disks), is a feature that was reserved for business or corporate world.  Recently, it has become a standard feature in almost all modern motherboards.  The ability to combine two or more physical hard drives into a single logical unit has reduced the bottleneck that is often found in modern system—the hard drive transfer rate.

A RAID is composed of three features:  mirroring, the copying of data to more than one disk; striping, the splitting of data across more than one disk; and error correction, where redundant data is stored to allow problems to be detected and possibly fixed (known as fault tolerance).  At different level of the RAID, these features can be configured to fit any user’s need.  Of course, the main reason for setting up the RAID is not really for a faster data transfer speed (although at certain RAID level, it can be obtained), the real benefit of a RAID setup is the data reliability.

As hard drives become cheaper and the storage capacity is getting larger every year, more desktop users are taking the advantage of pairing multiple hard drives in RAID so they would benefit from increase performance and data reliability.  Many people might wonder if it even makes sense to purchase a dedicated RAID controller, considering the availability of integrated SATA controllers with built-in RAID features found in current NVIDIA 680i, Intel ICH9R.  If the integrated controller can do the job, why bother to have a dedicated card?

The integrated controller will get the job done if you have less than 6~8 (depending on the motherboard) hard drives but it soon will hit its limits in a professional environment.  In addition, despite the fact that many high-end motherboards come with a few eSATA ports to be used with external storage, these ports usually cannot take the advantage of internal ports’ ability to offer RAID’s performance and redundancy.  This is where a dedicated RAID controller will be very useful. 

We have previously looked a few of these controllers in the past (RAID 2: A Look at the PCI Players) and today, we will delve into two more controllers which are slightly different from what we have previously reviewed.  These controllers that we are looking at today are designed specifically for the external storage usage.  The two expansion cards from HighPoint Technologies, the Rocketraid 2224 and RR231xPM, have similar features yet there are some subtle distinctions between them.  Let’s take a closer look at these cards.

HIGHPOINT TECHNOLOGIES

HighPoint Technologies, founded in 1995 specializes in providing cost effective multi-channel SATA RAID solutions that meet customer performance requirements. To ensure that their information is stored securely and backed up reliably, many organizations rely on HighPoint multi-channel SATA RAID solutions and RAID management utilities.

With its new family of 3.0Gbps SATA II RAID Controllers HighPoint is paving the way for customers to gain the benefits of the latest storage technologies. With a vision of delivering RAID storage solutions to all customer types HighPoint products are well positioned in the industry to meet the needs for the (SMB) small to medium business and meet requirements for the enterprise customer.

Today, HighPoint multi-channel SATA RAID solutions help maximize technology investments with highly available and easily manageable storage solutions for mission-critical storage, server, and application resources. The result is a high-performance, high-availability IT environment designed for cost-effective growth.