HighPoint Technologies' RocketRAID 3320 is one of the fastest and most stable cards tested by the CRN Test Center. The 3320 card is perfectly suited for data-intensive computing such as e-mail archiving, video streaming and many other uses for high-end storage systems.
The card was tested by rendering two animation videos from Blender.org and converting video samples. The test renders large files and performs extensive read writes on disks. Engineers checked primarily for accuracy but did not compare timing with other RAID cards. Nonetheless, the RAID 3320 controller performed admirably under RAID 0.
In addition to RAID 0, RocketRAID 3320 supports RAID 5, 6, 10, 50 and JBOD. The card arrives with eight ports for SATA II, so it is capable of producing throughput speeds of up to 3 Gbps.
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| PRODUCT: RocketRAID 3320 PRICE: $499 DISTRIBUORS/ INTEGRATORS: ASI, Bell Microproducts, D&H Distributing COMPANY: HighPoint Technologies Milpitas, Calif. (408) 942-5800 www.highpoint-tech.com |
RocketRAID comes with many other storage features such as TerabyteServer, Native Command Queuing, I2C enclosure management and staggered starting spin on drives. TerabyteServer preserves data temporarily in non-volatile memory, in cases of power failure.
The card supports Linux andFreeBSD. HighPoint states that the 3320 installs on Linux like plug and play. However, the documentation shows a few command line steps that must be performed after installation steps are completed using the graphical YAST tool. On FreeBSD, the driver modules must be configured and mounted manually.
The 3320 can rebuild drives by activating spare disks. For instance, administrators can reconfigure a damaged RAID array by turning on auto rebuild. Engineers found that activating and configuring RAID drives was quite easy with RocketRAID.
