A decent entry-level RAID card

Power users who want to take advantage of RAID are typically stuck between a rock and a hard place: their motherboard’s integrated RAID (the quality of which can vary wildly between chipsets) and expensive discrete controllers. HighPoint’s RocketRAID 2640x4 attempts to bridge the gap by offering better-than-onboard performance at a price much lower than fancier discrete cards.

As expected, the RocketRAID 2640x4, which has four SAS/SATA 3Gb/s ports but no onboard processor or memory, performed better than our test bed motherboard’s onboard RAID controller but couldn’t match the performance of the $450 Adaptec 5405, which boasts an onboard 1.2GHz processor and 256MB DDR2 cache.

Setting up the RocketRAID 2640x4 is simple: Drop in the card, hook up the drives, power up your computer, and hit Ctrl+H during boot. HighPoint’s BIOS makes creating and maintaining RAID a snap, and its Windows drivers are easy to install from the included disc.

The RocketRAID 2640x4 is inexpensive, easy to use, and offers huge RAID 5 write speed improvements over integrated controllers.

In two-disk RAID 0, the RocketRAID averaged 174MB/s reads and 148MB/s writes, slightly better than the EVGA’s 166MB/s and 135.9MB/s, but no match for Adaptec’s 210MB/s and 209MB/s. RAID 5, however, is where the difference between onboard RAID and even an inexpensive discrete card like the 2640x4 shines through. Echoing results from our May 2008 RAID controller showdown, using a discrete RAID controller rather than onboard upped RAID 5 write speeds nearly tenfold: 216.5MB/s on the 2640x4 versus only 25.3MB/s onboard. The 2640x4 even surpassed Adaptec’s much more expensive RAID controller in RAID 5 writes, though the Adaptec far outstripped the RocketRAID’s read speeds.

In our previous RAID card roundup, the RocketRAID 3510 took high honors for speedy RAID 5 performance on the cheap, and the 2640x4 continues that trend. As we said at the time, whether you need a discrete RAID card really depends on what you’re doing with it. For RAID 0, an entry-level RAID card like the 2640x4 offers modest boosts over the motherboard’s controller, while a more expensive card will give you bigger gains. In RAID 5, adding a drop-in card will immediately give you a significant increase in average write speeds.

The HighPoint RocketRAID 2640x4 isn’t the most feature-rich RAID card we’ve ever tested, but you get a lot of performance for $140, especially if you want to run RAID 5. The low price point, decent performance, and ease of use make this a good choice for an entry-level RAID controller.

HighPoint RocketRAID 2640x4

Rocketman (song)

Cheap; easy to install and use; improved RAID 5 over onboard controllers.

Rocketman (film)

Lacks stripe size options; RAID 0 not much better than onboard; no onboard processor or memory.

HighPoint

Benchmarks - RAID 5

	RocketRAID 2640x4	Adaptec 5405	EVGA 680i mobo
RAID 5	RAID 5 (4-disk)	RAID 5 (4-disk)	RAID 5 (4-disk)
HDTach Avg Read (MB/s)	161.6	247.7	154.5
HDTach Avg Write (MB/s)	216.5	206	25.3
HDTach Burst Read (MB/s)	373.5	815	348
HDTach CPU Utilization (%)	2	3	4
HDTach Random Access (ms)	7.5	7.5	7.4
Premiere Pro (sec)	651	632	843
PCMark Vantage	7,724	8,547	4,059

Best scores bolded. All RAID controllers were tested on a stock-clocked Intel QX6700 on an EVGA 680i SLI motherboard, using 300GB WD VelociRaptor drives. HDTach 3.0.1.0 and Premiere Pro encoding tests done in Windows XP 32-bit; PCMark Vantage tests run on 32-bit Windows Vista.

Benchmarks - RAID 0

	RocketRAID 2640x4	Adaptec 5405	EVGA 680i mobo
RAID 0 (2-disk)	RAID 0 (2-disk)	RAID 0 (2-disk)	RAID 0 (2-disk)
HDTach Avg Read (MB/s)	174.8	210	166
HDTach Avg Write (MB/s)	148.6	208	135
HDTach Burst Read (MB/s)	394	876	328
HDTach CPU Utilization (%)	3	2	5
HDTach Random Access (ms)	7.4	7.3	7.4
Premiere Pro (sec)	642	633	655
PCMark Vantage	7,282	8,173	6,900

Best scores bolded. All RAID controllers were tested on a stock-clocked Intel QX6700 on an EVGA 680i SLI motherboard, using 300GB WD VelociRaptor drives. HDTach 3.0.1.0 and Premiere Pro encoding tests done in Windows XP 32-bit; PCMark Vantage tests run on 32-bit Windows Vista.

Specifications

Connection	PCI Express x4
RAID Support	0, 1, 1+0, 5, JBOD
Processor	None
Memory	None
Connection	Four SAS/SATA ports