New Intel-Powered RAID Offering

With the release of RocketRAID 3520, HighPoint Technologies Inc., Milpitas, Calif., is taking hardware RAID to another level. The 3520 RAID controller comes with Intel Corp.'s new IOP 341 high performance I/O processor, which includes a multiported 533 MHZ DDR 2 cache memory controller that can store up to 4 Gbytes of 64-bit memory. The chip's speed of 1.2 GHz provides realtime RAID functionality.

CRN Test Center was impressed after some initial file I/O tests. The 3520 performed considerably faster than the older 3320 controller when transferring large media files between RAID-controlled drives and non-RAID drives on the same box.

The Web interface is configurable and provides some security. Administrators can lock down access so that only users that log on to the server with RAID controller can use the Web interface.

The 3520 adapter comes with 256 Mbytes of memory and supports RAID 0, 1, 5, 6, 10 and 50, including JBOD. The controller is housed in a low-profile card that is suitable for tower as well as rack-mounted servers. The low form factor was extremely convenient to install on a small tower server that the Test Center used for testing hardware. The adapter has a mini-SAS connector that supports up to 8 ports on a PCI-E x8 or x16 slots.

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