HighPoint RocketRAID 3120

INTRODUCTION

You may ask with current motherboards carry a minimum of six to eight SATA ports, what is the need for SATA expansion cards?  Well, it is true that for most users, the onboard SATA ports will be more than enough for the lifetime of the motherboard.  However, in the corporate environment, these onboard SATA ports can be used up quite fast.  Imagine that the eSATA will take up one port and with any RAID setup which consumes a minimum of two ports for RAID 0 or 1 and four ports for RAID 10 or 01, sooner or later, the need for extra SATA ports is inevitable.

Another reason to use expansion cards rather than onboard SATA controller would be free up the resource for other uses.  In addition, SATA expansion cards often offer extra features and have wider support for multiple operating systems that are not found with onboard SATA controller.  All of current motherboards will only work with Windows and/or Linux but not Mac due to the fact that Mac operating system usually comes with pre-designed components unlike PC counterparts.  Despite the fact that the underlying hardware and chipset maybe same, the drivers are simply not there for a Mac system to use PC components (of course you can always use boot camp or the hacked operating system but that is not truly running under Mac OS).  This is where the expansion cards can be useful.

Many of these RAID controllers found on current motherbards are software based (or more correctly, hardware-assisted software based).  These software based RAIDs usually are not as flexible as a true hardware RAID and do not perform as well as a true hardware RAID.  However, these RAIDs are cheap and easy to implement.  Hardware RAIDs are expensive but they are far more flexible and support multiple platform and operating systems.  In addition, hardware RAIDs usually have better performance since it offloads the workload to their own dedicated processor, thus free up the work from processor.  Today we are going to take a look at one of the cheapest hardware based RAID controller--the HighPoint RocketRAID 3120.  Join us as we put this controller through the tests.

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.