Description:
RocketRAID 6Gb/s PCI-Express Gen 2x8 SAS/SATA RAID Host Adapter; The simplified SGL package reduces up-front costs and provides Solution Providers with the freedom they need to configure storage platforms that meet clients' exact specifications.
I only had three requirements for this controller, starting with the most important:
1) Support for 8 SAS/SATA drives.
2) 6GB/s
3) under $250CAD
4) Linux/OpenSolaris support.
The RocketRAID 2720SGL was the only controller that came close to meeting all three of my requirements, and it surpassed them.
NOTE: This was used to expand storage in a Linux-based mdadm software RAID array. There was no consideration for RAID performance at all, so it is not mentioned. Windows support was also untested and ignored.
After reboot, the drives were detected and remained undisturbed. A critical detail if you don't want your data corrupted by the drive initialization done on some cards. Using the card for something other than JBOD will require initialization and will destroy all data.
There's not much more to say. Things were so seamless, I'm thinking of picking up a second just to have the expansion space.
Pros
Cons
Price, SAS/SATA 6GB/s
No SFF-8087 cables ( huge price premium for non-SGL version that includes them)
I bought this card to test out for a SFF workstation to do video work with. Running Windows 7 Pro 64 bit. Installed easily and recognized the four WD 250GB 2.5" Blacks right away. Raid was easy to set up and performs okay. It benches at 316MB Read 275MB write. I was hoping for more, but I am not disappointed. Don't forget to buy cables as it doesn't come with any.
I've had one of these cards in Dell Precision T5400 and T5500 Workstation systems since 2012, controlling RAID 0 arrays of four OCZ 480 GB Vertex 3 SSDs each.
At the moment I have two separate 4 drive RAID 0 arrays in a T5500 that boots up Windows 8.1 from one 2 TB array and runs several virtual machines (Windows XP, 7, 8.1, and 10) from the other.
It's hard not to get good performance with RAID 0, but this card has delivered ultimate reliability too. I haven't had even ONE glitch in the I/O subsystem, and I have run it continuously, without crashing, for 5 f.
Notably this controller card doesn't bottleneck very much the operations of two separate 4 drive arrays. While one array alone (per ATTO) will achieve about 140 MB / second throughput at 4k I/O sizes and 1.7 GB / second with large I/Os, when the test is run on both arrays simultaneously the small I/O rate is virtually unchanged, while the max I/O speed for the large requests only drops to about 1.3 GB / second.
If you're looking to bring a few years old system that only has SATA II (3 Gb/s) ports on the motherboard up to modern I/O performance levels, this card will delight.
The only problems I ever had were that I had to disable the motherboard's Intel RAID BIOS in order to get the system to boot up. Apparently there was some conflict between the motherboard RAID BIOS and the Highpoint on-card BIOS. But I'm still able to run the optical drive and several HDDs from the motherboard SATA II ports.
The only other complaint I had right at the start was that I did have to figure out what cable bundle to buy to control SATA III SSDs.
But after having installed the hardware it's been so flawless and delivered such good, responsive performance for so long that I can't really complain. This card has been quite a good value, considering I bought it when it was less than 1/4 the price of ONE 480 GB SSD.
-Noel
Pros
Cons
Inexpensive, easy to set up, fast and REALLY reliable
Needs a separate cable, a few BIOS quirks
Ratings
Overall
5
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