HighPoint RocketCache 3240X8 PCI-Express 2.0 x8 SSD RAID Caching Controller Card

Pros: It's a good idea, in theory.

Cons: The technology has not matured.

Other Thoughts: When it becomes a bootable device, then it will be an excellent product.

I would stay away from this device and would not reccommendit at this time.

Pros: This Cache card is super fast and very easy setup. I set mine up with a WD 600GB Velociraptor as the HDD and used 2 Adata SX900 64GB SSD's and a OCZ Vertex 4 as the cache accelerator. All the drives are SATA 6gbs. Im getting well over 1500MB per second reads and over 1200MB per second writes. the first program I loaded on the this system was a 37MB program and within a second after I pressed load, and Its was allready loaded and finished. Im going to make a change to a 1TB HDD as I want to put my 2 VelocityRaptors back as a RAID 0 configuration it only toped out at around 330Mb per second. and as soon as I get a litte more cash Im going to get another 3240x8 and tie the two Vraptors to two more SSD's I am extremely impressed with the performance of a such an inexpensive cache card. And would definately recomend it.

Cons: None so far. except that it seemed to slow my boot times by a tad.

Other Thoughts: From the reasearch I did about this card it a waste of money by using more than 60-64GB SSD's as the accelorator drives. And the Adata 64GB SSD's run over 500MB/s.

Pros: Inexpensive and relatively easy to configure. Definite speedup in some software build processes.

Cons: NTFS filesystem corruption. I haven't yet root caused it, but with the write back cache enabled, one of my large software build jobs consistently corrupts the filesystem.

Other Thoughts: The card's BIOS doesn't play nice with bitlocker. Assumes my system has changed config at every boot.

Pros: Flexible ssd caching solution at a reasonable price.

Performance modes allow hdd's to be striped or mirrored; ssd's are striped with the option of write-through or write-back caching.

Web GUI could use some polishing, but is very easy to use.

I have 2x 7200rpm 1.5Tb Seagates, and 2x OCZ Vertex (gen 1) drives running in "High Performance with Cache Protection" (hdds in raid 0, with a write through cache).

Was easy enough to install the Linux driver and Web GUI on Ubuntu. I saw good benchmark results from gnome-disk-utility (palimpsest), which apparently uses an algorithm with a high chance of re-testing the same blocks between runs. After a few runs, I saw results stabilize to a max rate of 380MB/s with an average access time of .04ms.

Cons: Non-configurable, loud audible alarm.

Initially, the two ssd's were running different firmware versions (1.5, and 1.6). The RocketCache apparently didn't like this. Within 8 hours, the audible alarm had gone off twice to notify me that one ssd had failed. After a reboot, the ssd was back "on line" and operating normally. Updating the firmware on both drives to the same level seems to have fixed this problem.

Performance is hard to gauge. On Windows 7, some runs with HDTune (free) produced odd results. Some runs yielded an avg rate of ~30MB/s, and some were more reasonable in the mid 100s. I saw less drastic, but similar results from ATTO.

For whatever reason, large file transfers from or to the RocketCache always drop to a speed of 30MB/s. This made copying my Steam folder (about 600GB) a painful process.

Copying the same data set to the same hdd's in a normal Windows software stripe is two to three times faster.

Note: Apparently, a maximum of 64GB can be allocated to t

Other Thoughts: Tech support was responsive, but couldn't answer my questions. Eventually, an engineer responded (in rather poor English) with detailed information.

According to this engineer, the cache eviction policy is "least recently used" based. If I understood him/her correctly, ALL reads are pushed into the cache. Whether or not the read "blocks" until the cache is updated was not clear. (IF the read does block, I believe a cache miss will result in an additional performance hit while the data is written to the cache!)

I have a limited understanding of caching in general, but I don't see this as a particularly smart policy for an ssd cache. If I understand correctly, something as simple as a virus scan is going to generate a LOT of writes to the cache (and wipe all your useful cached data away in the process).

Would love to see some form of caching statistics (hit/miss ratios, etc)

Considering purchasing a newer sandforce based ssd to see if performance improves...