HighPoint RocketRAID 1720 PCI SATA II (3.0Gb/s) RAID Controller Card

Pros: Despite what other reviews say, this card does work with Windows 7 64bit. Got the correct drivers from HighPoint's website as well as ver. 1.1 BIOS. Building a RAID 1 array was easy from the BIOS console and windows picked it up right away. Loaded my data back on to the array from my offline backup disk and away she went. Great little hardware-based RAID card.

Cons: none so far.

Pros: 1. 107.0/92.1 MB/s burst/average transfer over 2 TB range, 4% CPU

2. Runs in 66MHz as well as 33MHz slot

3. HDD drive activity LED headers, plus disk fail LED headers, beeper audio alert

4. 64-bit LBA for 2 TB single partitions

Cons: 1. No SMART data pass-through available for smartmontools, HD Tune

2. Device managment console reports only SMART index values, not raw data, no data range monitoring

3. Transfer rates capped by PCI, not 3 Gbps

4. Can't copy data from managment console panes to clipboard for documentation purposes -- screenshots only

Other Thoughts: Inexcusably, this device passes no SMART data to Windows that can be used by SMART monitoring software like smartmontools or HD Tune. Does not even pass model and serial number, so useless as just a PCI host bus adapter onto which you can attach SATA drives to an older motherboard. Flexibility but complexity of a web-style managent console interface. Did not test RAID.

-- Roy Zider

Pros: None at the moment.

Cons: Installation of the card was straightforward. But when I tried to mirror the golden drive to an external drive, the first step in setting up RAID 1, the copy failed with three different backup software packages. I then brought in a more knowledgable IT friend and he had no luck either. As he put it, "We're waiting for the technology to improve." Whatever.

Other Thoughts: Make sure sure the RAID card you buy really is compatible with your OS.

Pros: 8 Port SATAII RAID
Excellent Price Point
Easy to setup

Cons: PCI Bottleneck
It wasn't free

Other Thoughts: I used this card to rebuild and add RAID 5 to an older server. The PCI bottleneck was unavoidable because of the age of the mobo.

I would recommend this card only if you have no other slots on your mobo to run a RAID controller on, but beware that PCI will hold you back a bit

Pros: none

Cons: I went through all of the note in this section. I tried everything and I could not get it to work on an DEll Optiplex 755. Wasted 6 hours of time.

Other Thoughts: Going on past experience, the RR454 for IDE Raid was the easiest and most trouble free raid product I ahve enver used. Go figure.

Pros: will manage SATA drives compatible for RHEL installation. My drives were installed on a Xforce nVidia motherboard that was software-simulating RAID. This card allowed to have full RAID with SATA disks

Cons: Linux driver is delivered as a bootable formatted 1.44MB floppy .img file. To install, you will need a floppy drive in server. Since my server only included a bootable cdrom drive (who uses floppies anymore?) I have to fork extra money for a linux-compatible floppy drives and install in a very tight server box. I wished Highpoint would supply Linux drivers on a bootable CD image .iso instead.

I also encountered an issue with the HBA controller card BIOS in my server that has a SATA cdrom drive. The issue did not occur in the other server with an older EIDE cdrom.

Other Thoughts: Tried contacting support at HighPoint through email. No replies. Tried calling HighPoint support; no one answers the phone. Tried leaving message at Highpoint; no call back.
Make sure the card works and if not don't hesitate to return. If I don't hear from Highpoint in 2 days I'll have to return the cards to Newegg.com which would be sad considering it is difficult to find linux-compatible good RAID card.

Pros: Works well. Has all of the features like email notification and a web client that you would expect

Cons: Drivers not loaded by default in 2003 in setup which means dusting off the old floppy drive. What a friggen pain

Other Thoughts: Windows Home Server SP1 OEM has an error on the disc which makes it hard to load the drivers for the RAID card. YOU MUST use an old style floppy drive (not USB) as the GUI installer reboots the computer and a script misplaces the path of the drivers.

A floppy works like a champ. If I had started with that instead of trying USB, and then BartPE to edit path of the drivers, and then . . . . . .

I would have been a lot happier. Just an FYI

Pros: - intuitive BIOS
- simple setup

Cons: ?

Other Thoughts: RAID array built in under 10 minutes, no problems with drivers on a Dell Vostro. Simple, elegant RAID solution. Rebuilds failed arrays easily.

Pros: Didn't get to use it so can't say.

Cons: Didn't get to use so can't say.

Other Thoughts: Linux support is provided only if you have a floppy drive and only for Suse, Fedora and RHEL. An Opensource driver is available on Highpoint's web site, but requires a manual kernel module build and install, which I could not get to work on my Debian box. Sad to say my 2 new SATA devices are useless...

Didn't know how to rate the purchase so gave it "half" since in all fairness it probably works fine, just not for me.

Pros: This is the first HighPoint raid controller I have used. Set it up in a Raid 1. I have always ued Promise Raid cards before. Believe me HighPoint is so much easier to setup and configure that I am staying with HighPoint from now on. Use it on Windows Server 2003. Tryed a tech net version of Windows Server 2008 but it did not find the drives. Perhaps just needs different drivers and I have not looked for them yet. Content with 2003 version yet anyway

Cons: Wish they had a safe way to convert Promise Raid 1 controled drives to HighPoint Raid 1

Other Thoughts: I am done with Promise after using one of the HighPoint Raid drive controllers. At least for new installs.