HighPoint Rocket 622 PCI-Express 2.0 x1 SATA III (6.0Gb/s) Controller Card

Pros: None

Cons: Card goes into a detecting devices mode during boot and sits there. I tried disabling the other controllers on the mother board and several other work a rounds but card just wont work on my motherboard.

Other Thoughts: I would love to find a card that doesn't suck if someone can suggest one

Pros: Works very well when used with external HD boxes that have hardware configured RAID (i.e. RAID configured by settings on the external box, NOT by software). See comments below.

Cons: Probably not the adapter you want if you're trying to JBOD a bunch of miss-matched disks in an external box.

Other Thoughts: I use Sans Digital TR4UTBPN and Mediasonic HFR2-SU3S2FW, some with SATA II WD green 1 & 2 TB drives, others with SATA III WD green & black 1 & 2 TB drives -- 14 boxes in all; most on Win7-64, 3 on Win7-32; one Win7-64 has 2 cards driving 4 boxes. All run flawlessly.

About thruput - misconceptions abound: (1) No spinning disk drives come anywhere near being able to write at 5 gbps (600 MBps) -- most max out at about 80 MBps of sustained data writing after you subtract out the short-term effect of RAM and on-disk memory caching; (2) If you use RAID 0 (stripping), which splits files and writes parts to all disks simultaneously, you will see thruput increase to about 160-200 MBps (on 4-drive boxes) depending on the drives used; (3) If you select RAID 1, 5 10 (or 0 with mirroring) for internal redundancy, expect to see thruput DROP BELOW 80 MBps; (3) File type/size affects thruput, expect multi-GB vob & mp4 files to move at much higher thruput than stacks of small jpg, mp3, pdf, etc.

Pros: None

Cons: This card was bundled with a SansDigital TR5M+ I bought. This card has given me nothing but problems. First, it is poorly supported in Linux (not supported since kernel 2.8 and I am running 3.4). I tried for a solid week to get the card to work in Linux with no success.

I finally gave up on Linux and though I would try it on my Windows 7 system. The first time I booted up the card's manager booted and recognized my drives. I setup a RAID 5 and got into Windows. I then installed their web management tool and restarted my computer which then gave me a BSOD. After fixing this issue I finally got into Windows. I looked at the web management tool and it said 28 hours to initialize the array.... no surprise considering 5TB.

Other Thoughts: FOUR DAYS and multiple rebuilds later (with the stupid thing crashing and beeping at me every few hours) I was able to access my drive but it wasn't long before it failed. I checked all of my disks (All are Segate Barracuda 7200, not green drives) and everything was fine. The web management software refused to load and had to be reinstalled twice. The little bit of time the card did work, transfer speeds were less than 100Mb/s. I finally gave up and bought another card.

Pros: I was able to get it to work with a bit of effort.

Cons: Old (xp/server 2003) drivers on vendor site so you'll need to find your own for the Marvell 99SE9128 chipset. I also had to find an update to the firmware. If a drive was connected during boot then post would hang. After all of this it still wasn't faster than one of the motherboard's sata II ports.

Other Thoughts: I put this in the x16 slot of my Supermicro motherboard. Tested with Sata III enclosure, Sata III eSata cable, and Sata III drive.

From what I've seen I'm not sure anyone else's implementation of this Marvell chipset works any better. Still, Highpoint didn't have any information even in the documentation past Windows XP and Server 2003.

Pros: Seemed like it was a reasonable cost for 6G eSATA adapter and appears to be identical to the one selling for more than twice as much by NewerTechnology.

Cons: I tried this in my workstation Acer M5100 and machine would not boot with it installed (used StarTech card instead). It also does not work in Dell PowerEdge T110 or T310 servers (they boot, but card won't initialize after drivers are loaded)

Pros: Comes with management UI so you can configure your disks without having to boot into the BIOS every time

Cons: - Froze my computer whenever I did sustained transfers at first, went to their site and updated the BIOS, now freezes my computer only once in a while
- Management UI doesn't have support for sending email via SSL, which all smtp servers require for authentication these days, so send email on error event feature is worthless
- Controller is flaky. I put in a set of 1 TB WD disks, worked for a few months, then the UI tells me my disks have failed. I swap them out for disks that were working fine in a different chassis, it tells me those disks are inconsistent. I buy a new set of disks and put them in. A day later, controller tells me the disks are inconsistent.

Other Thoughts: If you want decently reliable storage, avoid this.

Pros: These Rocket 622 cards function fairly well as basic eSATA controller cards. Their throughput is nowhere close to saturating SATA III, but that is to be expected. All in all, not bad if all you need is a basic card to hook up one or two SINGLE external hard drives via eSATA ports. However, don't expect this card to work with external non-RAID enclosures containing more than one hard drive. For that, you will need a different card with port multiplier functions and/or a RAID eSATA card. See Cons.

Cons: Contrary to what Marvin posted on 10/6/2010, I have verified this card does NOT support a port multiplier (PM) function. I tried (2) R622 cards with both Sans Digital & Mediasonic "dumb" (non-RAID) enclosures and every case Windows 7 64-bit would only recognize the 1st drive installed in either enclosure. Both boxes correctly identified all (4) HDDs if I hooked them up via USB.

The response Marvin received from HighPoint support is therefore erroneous/misleading & should be noted here. It looks as if the model he received a response about a variation model "R622A" which is somehow different than the "R622" that Newegg is currently stocking (as well as another e-tailer named after a rain-forest).

Here is the response I received this evening from HighPoint Global:

*****************
Dear Sir or Madam,

Sorry, R622 doesn't support PM. I am afraid you have to use a different card which supports PM.

Regards

Global Support Department
HighPoint Technologies, Inc.
**********

Other Thoughts: If you need a good, inexpensive 2 port eSATA controller card to recognize all your hard drives in an external non-RAID enclosure, this is NOT the card you want. Instead, look for a card using the Sil3132 chipset.

Pros: Easy to install and cheap, way faster than USB.

Cons: None so far.

Other Thoughts: I own 2 of these and run a Sans Digital T5RUT(B) 10 GB RAID 5 System through this card with fantastic results. Also use Hard Drive dock with esata connection for lightning fast back-ups.

Pros: Looks like a nice card. I have the HighPoint Rocket 620 in another machine and it works fine.

Cons: Doesn't work with my Phenom II x6 AM3 system using an Asus M488TD-V EVO/USB3 mobo. In the two full PCIe 2 slots it displays during boot but then the system hard-hangs before doing the final BIOS output. In the short PCIe 2 slot the card firmware never displays - it's like the card isn't in the system at all.

My M488TD-V EVO system is very plain vanilla with no other PCI or PCIe cards since I'm using onboard video and nothing but mouse, keyboard and monitor connected so I don't think this is a system configuration issue. It does have 16GB of memory but that shouldn't be a factor.

Other Thoughts: At first I thought I had a defective 622 but now I think that the Asus mobo doesn't have enough BIOS memory headroom to allow the firmware to initialize. This happened to me with another RAID controller in my Asus P6T6 mobo system. Ironically, I was able to use the Rocket 620 in that system.

This problem with Asus and BIOS memory is a known issue - just google it. Essentially don't expect to be able to add PCIe cards with significant firmware (eg controller cards) to Asus-based systems. They need to cut out the BIOS cruft like expressgate or move to EFI which has lots of memory to work with.

Only giving this 3 stars because I don't know if it actually works or is defective but I suspect the BIOS headroom issue.

Pros: Very Very nice to get a product for a good price plug it in and it works like it should will get more of these cards in the future.

Cons: none

Other Thoughts: using this card to hot swap hard drives with two thermaltake blackX
sata