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HighPoint Rocket RAID 1640

Highpoint is probably the only manufacturer of a SATA RAID Level5 capable adapter card in the sub $100 price range. The controller itself is the known parallel HighPoint HPT374 IC with four Marvell bridge chips interposed between the controller and the connectors. In other words, because of the point-to-point connectivity of Serial ATA, four individual bridges in the form of the Marvell 88i8030 NNC are necessary to support four drives, the arbitration is then handled on the level of the controller itself. Needless to say that this is not a Native SATA solution and, therefore, it will not have some of the advanced features of Serial ATA, that is, e.g. Deferred Spin or Native Command Queuing capabilities.

           

The shipping box featuring the specs on its outside. Shipping contents include four SATA cables, the manual and three floppies with the drivers and the RAID utility for Windows. The 32bit/33MHz PCI card itself with the four SATA connectors that are interfaced with the HighPoint HPT374 controller via Marvell 88i8030 NNC bridge chips. A massive boot-ROM contains all the instructions inclucing mini-drivers for the initial access of the RAID configuration in Level5 configuration until the real drivers are loaded into the operating system, a prerequisite for being able to access the drives in the first place. This complexity of the initialization of any RAID Level5 system is often underestimated but suffice it to say that after verifying the DMI pool and building the ESCD list, the system sits apparently idle for over 30 seconds during which the RAID configuration is loaded from the boot ROM until anything else is happening.

Let's take a quick glance at the specs:

What is interesting here is that we are still stuck with a 32bit / 33 MHz interface, meaning that the highest bandwidth possible to shove through the pipes will be 133 MB/sec. This means that with any of the newer drives, the effective host transfer rate will already be saturated in a RAID Level0 configuration of two drives, since the combined sequential transfer rate of all drives should not exceed roughly 115-120 MB/sec to allow some headroom for the command overhead.

On the other hand, the special feature of the RocketRAID 1640 is the support for Level5 RAID, even if it is done in software, meaning that it is using CPU cycles for any of the RAID arbitrations including the XOR calculations.

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