HighPoint RocketRAID 454 PCI IDE Controller Card

Pros: Used this card for a raid 5 array on my storage server. Made some of my older IDE drives valuable again.

Cons: None. It worked so well with the 120 gig drives, I wish I could buy some more with higher capacity.

Pros: Works fine. I installed it within an hour. Brought more life to an old computer.

Cons: non.

Other Thoughts: Thank you!

Pros: I had a old machine that I made into a NAS server and need a cheap controller card. I love this card. It can easily connected to it. I'm only using it as a controller card right now but I love the fact that I have the ability to do actually RAID not software RAID. Software RAID is OK I just prefer hardware RAID over it. Any way great RAID card for anyone. Would defiantly recommend.

Cons: None so far

Pros: I have eight hard drives plugged into this thing. I setup two raids. One with 6 120gb drives in a raid 5 setup and two 320s in a raid 0 with striping. So far the setup is working great in an XP box that I setup as a server for the house. That little RAID card was easy to setup and is running great.

Cons: None really but see other.

Other Thoughts: The only con that isn't really a con is the raid card beep is REALLY loud. If the raid is broken (I did some testing) that thing screams like you wouldn't believe. But really if your RAID is in trouble you do want to know about it pretty quick.

Pros: I ultimately found this to be a great inexpensive card to use when you need no-frills RAID support in an OS where software RAID isn't supported. The card has been in regular use for almost a year with no problems.

Cons: I am an IT professional who has configured various other brands of RAID controller in larger servers before, but I found the RAID BIOS menus and Windows utilities to be somewhat confusing. I can definitely understand how people new to RAID could feel a bit lost. I got everything working on the first try, but I felt the need to sit down and really read the manual carefully and completely to make sense of this controller.

Other Thoughts: If you aren't building a new system from scratch, create a disk image to use as a backup before you attempt the configuration. It's a real sanity-saver.

Pay close attention to UDMA modes reported by the card for each channel. If the mode doesn't agree with the maximum speed of your device, something is wrong.

At first, I thought the card was super slow, but I found it kept intermittently dropping one channel down to PIO instead of UDMA level 5. In my case, it was caused by a flaky 80 conductor cable that needed replacing to get the channel to stay set at UDMA 5 speeds. Unsurprisingly, this one bad cable had caused the RAID-1 array to absolutely crawl! Messaging from the software to the effect of, "Hey, I see you installed two identical disks, but one is performing vastly slower than the other" would have been really helpful, but never happened. Once I resolved this problem, I/O on my RAID-1 disk was about as fast as it had been before with a single disk on the mainboard's integrated controller.

Pros: I suspect that it works, if you're lucky. As a quick test, I stuck the card in an ASUS P5KPL mobo. The bios utility was available in this mobo and the drives connected to the card were recognized correctly. I'm fairly sure that the card would have worked correctly in this mobo.

Cons: I got the card to add IDE ports to a Gigabyte GA-G41M-ES2L mobo. In this mobo, the RocketRaid functionality is minimal. The bios utility won't run and I couldn't get the system to boot from the card. I could, however, install debian in a software raid 1 configuration on a couple of disks connected to the card as JBOD. I just couldn't get it to boot.

Other Thoughts: I couldn't find a useful list of compatible/incompatible mobos. So, unless you have a good assortment of available mobos to choose from, or somehow know that YOUR mobo is OK, buying it looks like a crapshoot.

Pros: Hardware RAID is tons better than the Windows dynamic disks (software RAID) I had before. I like the hot spare/hot swap and e-mail features as well. This controller would be ideal for a small home/office server.

Cons: Yes, it is true that this controller can put a heavy load on the CPU in RAID5 mode because it doesn't do its own XORing. The management console software is a bit klunky as well.

Other Thoughts: I bought this controller for my server and am currently running a 250GB RAID1 array. I didn't test connecting a CD-ROM to this controller. Any bootcd will need to contain the driver in order to see any drives or arrays attached.

*Noteworthy Test Results*
I tested hot swap/hot spare successfully with a simulated drive failure (yanked the drive's power cable).
It took about 1.5hrs to build/initialize an 80GB RAID5 array (P4, 1.5GHz, 768MB, 2k3 system).
Installed XP on RAID5 array with a successful boot-up (driver floppy disk required, F6 when prompted).

Pros: There are 31 Reviews of This Product , + Reading them , is a Really intelligent thing to do , Hints , Secrets , but Maybe , not Guaranteed information . if Your PC is a Desktop , + Was Built with a Hard Drive Larger than 8 GB , and is Also ' ATA 100 ' , Not , ATA 133 or ATA 66 , [ Didnt come with Windows Vista as an Option , or PC's Built from 2000 Until 2005 , this stuff is Findable on the item ] , This Card is Fantastic , it Lets you Plug in the new 800 GB Hard Drive [ 10 times the Electricity ] in a PC which has a Power Supply , Which , can only handle the Older , 80 GB or Less Hard Drive , it isnt a Plastic Expansion Card with Metal Chips on it for Slow - Down of Electricity , The Card is All Metal , with a Thin Plastic Clear Coating on it , + Chips on the Card , it allows you to Plug in , 4 Hard Drives into This 1 Card , its for , ATA [ Hard Drive ] 40 Pins Connector + ATAPI [ CD/DVD ] 40 Pins Connector , Continued Below , under ' Cons ' , in ' Other thoughts ' .

Cons: i Dont know how many RAID Cards can , if Any , Let you " Write " [ Copy ] to a Blank CD , while the CD/DVD Burner is Plugged in to the RAID Card , my CD/DVD Burner became a CD/DVD ROM , until i Plugged it Back into the CD/DVD Motherboard Connector - Unless its the D , in Celeron D , [ Download = Make 1,000,000 Copy's + Sell them , Vandalize them = Protection Services ] , in other words , Register Server , Ole Server , GEARsec.exe

Other Thoughts: it Comes with 4 , 18 inch Long , 40 Pin , Ribbon Cables , for Free , a Printed Booklet [ 100 Pages ? or more ] , i Jumped to the 2 install Pages , Followed the instructions To the Letter , Used the CD that came with it because you Have to install the Driver' - or - Drivers' , but i didnt install the Software that Came with it , im just using the RAID Card as a Hardware Piece Only .

Pros: - "plug-and-play" with linux, no driver needed to recognize and use connected drives
- 8 drive capacity
- the current sale price make it a killer deal, get 2 for HA (highly-available) software raid config

Cons: - read some "interesting" things on the hardware raid driver for both win and linux (didn't plan on using it anyway)

- old IDE tech, if you don't have a stockpile of old, working IDE drives don't bother

Other Thoughts: This is the perfect solution for all my old IDE drives I keep accumulating. Got 2 of these and started creating mirrored MD pairs (one per card) into LVM. Combined with the on-board IDE the system now has a 20 IDE disk capacity, prior to this I was stuck w/ only the on-board 4 disk capacity w/ 320G drives in software-raid10. Now I added another pair of 320G disks and 2 pair of 250G for nearly 3Tb raw and 1.5Tb of usable protected storage.

Sure, I could have just gotten 2 x 1.5Tb SATA drives to start out with, but my old PC I wanted to use as a server didn't have SATA, and I would have spend about 3x what I did for these cards so using the old stuff is well worth it despite the additional power consumption.

Pros: Appears to be a great quality IDE controller. I have not used the RAID function of the card, but instead use software RAID. Everything is running flawlessly on my Ubuntu server. This is a great product and I have another en route.

Cons: None so far.