HighPoint RocketRAID 2720SGL PCI-Express 2.0 x8 Low Profile SATA / SAS Controller Card

Pros: This is great SATA controller. I use it in iSTAR disk cage for software RAID 5 with Fedora 17.

Cons: none

Pros: Cheap and good RAID 10 performance, while it was working.

Cons: Painfully incompatible with SuperMicro server boards. Spent a week trying different driver and BIOS settings and working with support to conclude this card will just not work.

Caused random hangs during BIOS & POST, data corruption on drives connected to the on-board SATA ports, caused on-board Ethernet to stop working and all sorts of general weirdness that stopped as soon as I disabled and removed the card.

Other Thoughts: Do not get this card if you plan to use it with a Supermicro motherboard.

Pros: Great card for the money. Works great, zero issues with 1TB caviar blacks, WD1002FAEX's and cheapest mini sas to sata breakout cables I could find.

Cons: To setup email alerts is not very straight forward. I'm also using the as shipped v1.0 firmware which probably plays a role in buggy web gui setup issues. Already had a few TB's copied on to it before I started tinkering with that part of the gui.

Other Thoughts: Have had great success with this card, in my home storage server I have 8 1TB caviar blacks in a raid 6 configuration connected to this card. I don't care too much about benchmarks but I know I can saturate my gigabit lan on sequential read AND writes from my workstation's raptors which is plenty fast for me. Rebuild/scrubs take 28 hours with no raid activity.

Pros: Works well when set up and configured. Actually quite easy to set up in with Windows.

I have 4 x Western Digital Red WD30EFRX 3TB in Raid 5 It took 7 hours or so to initialize the drives using the webui application. I ran it in windows server 2k8 r2 without issue.

Cons: Highpoint needs to make a SATA III breakout cable, I am rubbing up against the SATA II bottleneck.

I have used ubuntu and other linux distributions off and on for the 5 years or so. I run Mint on my primary laptop. I would classify myself as a somewhat technical linux user, which means I know enough to google solutions and try them but I don't really understand 100% what I am doing.

It is most likely user error but I could not get the linux drivers loaded in ubuntu 10.04.

OS support is lagging behind, esx/i 4.0 and ubuntu 10.04 are the max supported by this card.

Other Thoughts: Many people are saying this card runs hot. I took an IR thermometer to the heat sink and the highest reading I got was 62C while I was using IO Meter to stress the array. Obviously that's not room temperature but I believe that it is acceptable.

If you are using this for ESXi you will want to enable SSH to transfer the drivers over and install them. The guide is little help since the ESXi install didn't seem to find any of the drives that I was giving it to mount.

Pros: Fairly easy to set up. Being able to connect up to 8 SATA drives. Cheap RAID 6. Recovery from failing drives is a snap.

Cons: Very picky about the host motherboard. Mine got to the year and started having fits. Windows Home Server will report that the card would not respond before the timeout period and only a hard reboot will resolve the issue, until it randomly comes up again.

Other Thoughts: Since December it has progressively gotten worse. Tried re-installing from scratch, different motherboards, BIOS versions, and nothing can appease it.
Since it seems to work for a bit I am not completely sure if the card is going bad or if there is a compatibility issue with the motherboards I've used. Hightpoint has a very short motherboard compatibility matrix but at this point I don't trust the card anymore to waste money on it.

Pros: After installing the raid controller and attached every drives to it, do the followings to make it work perfectly. (Bad reviews are due to people that haven't done it this way.)
1. (With windows) - DO NOT INSTALL THE DRIVERS FROM THE CD !!!
2. Instead, go to their website : http://www.highpoint-tech.com/USA_new/CS-series_rr272x.htm and navigate under the "Storage Configurations" tab to download the appropriate driver for your system.
3. Install it and reboot your computer.
(To install the driver go to "Device Manager" and select the Raid controller. click on search for drivers and instead of via internet click on select a driver from my computer, then select the one you just downloaded.)
4. On their website again, under the same tab download the Web RAID Management utility, install it and reboot.
5. If you went this way, it should work perfectly.
6. For those who said it wasn't compatible with SATA III and SAS, it's due because your bios version is still on v1.0. Update it via the web interface under the physical tab. (To download the latest bios go here : http://www.highpoint-tech.com/USA_new/CS-series_rr272x.htm under the same tab "Storage Configurations" as mention above).
7. After a reboot everything should be alright and work perfectly.

For those who need more help with the web interface navigate trought this site : http://www.highpoint-tech.com/help/ .

Cons: None at this moment.

Other Thoughts: 4 x ST3000NC002 SeaGate Constellation CS 3Tb.
2 x 3ware CBL-SFF8087OCF-06M

Pros: 8 drives on one controller

Cons: Claims to be SATA-III, but only works at SATA-II speed

stopped working after half my data was transferred. No biggie, it's only 4 TB of data that took me years to compile.

Other Thoughts: Tech support is useless. Basicly told me it was 100% my fault because I used software that came in the box and firmware that was installed on the hardware. I was told to update the bios and driver. Could not find BIOS software on their website

Pros: I have one of these cards thats been working for well over a year connecting 6 drives in RAID 1+0. Before that it just connected them to Win7 and ran them as mirrored storage.

Cons: None

Other Thoughts: I thought it might be helpful for people to know that cables are readily available at Newegg. HighPoint cables are now listed on the same page as the card. Other company cables are offered under server accessories.

Pros: Works in both Mac and Windows and great speed.

Cons: Installing Windows as a bit difficult. I had to load the drivers in the repair your Windows install menu and not the Install screen or the SSD/HDD would disconnect and the alarm would go off.

Other Thoughts: Difficult to find SAS to Sata 6 Cables. Newegg does not carry any. Still can not get sleep to work with this card.

Asus Rampage IV Extreme

Pros: Price?

Cons: Install went very smoothly. Windows 7x64 Pro sees the card. Plug in a SATA drive while the system is running (via hot swap bay) and Windows sees the drive. Great. Remove the drive and Windows CRASHES hard. At reboot, CHKDISK runs and finds LOTS of problems on drives that were NEVER connected to this SATA card.

When you contact HighPoint customer support your are forced to create an online account. The odd thing is the account creation form does not ask for a password. When you attempt to log in you are required to enter a password. What password???? If you ask the site to send you a password reminder or password reset instructions, you NEVER receive an email. Unless you can find their phone number (which is not displayed anywhere on their web site) there is no way to contact them.