Pros: Perfomance. This is a very fast card with a nice feature set for the price point. It rivals Adaptec's similar offerings in performance (except RAID 10) and basic features. The BIOS setup is actually easier to use than Adaptec, though it is a bit slower to scan the drives and get on with the bootup.

Cooling not neeed. Runs nice and cool without active air flow. Running full tilt on an RAID6 with 7 15KRPM (3TB) drives it hits around 48C.

Super fast rebuild and init times. These controllers are far faster than any other I have tried, especially LSI. The above array 3TB took 55 minutes to init.

Overall, these cards are very reliable, robust, and afordable.

You can read the individual drive's SMART data through a backplane.

JBOD support is very handy! On detection a drive gets added as an individual drive (with the data!), and can be initialized to JBOD for status monitoring afterwards if desired.

The 'Keep Data' option is not available on many cards. This one lets you leave the data on the drives alone when creating any array or JBOD.

I've run some of these for over a year without a single glitch. I have also done extensive rebuild testing by setting up a server and pulling drives in numerous configurations.

Cons: Support is annoying. The documentation is (very) lacking, with some connector information just missing. The support site is a mess, and the only option to talk to them is over email. They respond once a day, usually with a single reply as if it's a live chat. I typically just browse their site's files and find what I need myself since they don't remove old content either.

All Highpoint products are lacking refinement. They just haven't been making these cards (or offering good tech support) long enough to have worked out all those little details.

Power management options don't work. May drives just won't spin back up. It doesn't appear to spin down hot spares separately from any other drive, so it's all or nothing (really just nothing since it doesn't work).

Overall feature set is a bit lacking compared to other entry level cards. However, the price on those cards reflect the extra features (like 5EE and full expander backplane support). But if you are building that complex of a system, why are you trying to save $200 on the controller anyway?

Other Thoughts: Maturity is lacking in their whole company/product line. If you want a well proven feature set with lots of community support and history of fixes, buy an Adaptec. If you can manage most issues on your own and understand RAID well, this is a nice affordable option.

Pros: 12G Hardware RAID controllers are finally becoming more common. I figured this was a good time to start looking for a bargained priced 6G model. This is why I ended up settling on the RocketRAID 4520. In fact, it looks to be the cheapest hardware RAID controller on the market right now.
It helped that this card has been available for several years now, so I didn't expect anything to go awry.
The initial testing was done with Windows 2012R2 and 8 Seagate enterprise drives setup for RAID 5. It had no trouble recognizing the hard drives, and was easy to install my workstation. The card has browser software for creating arrays, which is also easy to setup and use.
I expected performance in the 1000MB/s range, but was surprised and disappointed to only get around 800 sustained. The drives are capable of more than this, and a hardware RAID controller should have no trouble pushing hard disks to their limits speed wise.

Cons: Too early to say – see my Other Thoughts

Other Thoughts: After hitting the 800MB/s ceiling, I was starting to worry that the lower cost was not related to 12G, and maybe related to the hardware’s limitations?
Hopefully, I am just doing something wrong and this card can actually perform like a hardware RAID controller should. I sent a request to their support department (online only), which says it will respond in 24 hours. I tend to dislike online-only support service, to put it mildly, but I guess I will take a wait and see approach. If they come through (or not) I'll update this review

Pros: fast fast. it is not made for ssd's if you had 5 WD 10,000 rpm hd's they would be almost as fast a a single ssd. you have to look at pcie type ssds for more speed.

Cons: shame on you guys.

Other Thoughts: raid 0 = latency for 2 hd's to transfer form spinning platters , it's simple, no platters, no latency. raid 1 is an idea. for a server, I would give each person and ssd , sd3, sd4 sd5, ect and probley backup on raid5 using WD's

Pros: Just started using this SAS cards, been using RR cards for years and then have been great, no complaints here

Cons: none

Pros: None

Cons: it took 72 hrs to complete the configuration of a 3 (2tb each) disk RAID 5 array. Drvrs wouldnt load during install of Win srvr 2008 R2. I had to attach a HDD to the system board controller to load windows. Once Windows has loaded I loaded the drivers for the Rocket RAID card and tried to format the 4tb logical disk. After 72hrs the drive still wasn't formatted. I loaded the management utility hoping a firmware update would help. The management utility did not work. And, the server blue screend until the management util was uninstalled. Tech support was no help at all. Tech support is email only with overnight response. Each tech that works the case starts from the beginning as if there are no case notes. It's been over a month and the issue hasn't been resolved. I had to buy an Adaptec controller. The disk initialized, and created the array in less than 30 seconds

Other Thoughts: Do not wast your money on anything by Highpoint, there is no tech support. I wish I could have given it zero stars.

Pros: Install was easy. Bios Setup was intuitive, and easy to follow. Low Cost when compared to other 512MB cache cards. Stays relatively cool. Was able to hit 3 GB/s reads ( bytes, not bits ) with a 6 x SSD raid 0 array but only when stripe size set to 512 KB.

Cons: SSD performance for transfers under 64KB are terrible. There was absolutely no increase in speed when adding additional Drives to the array. I was only hitting 20K IOPs reads with 6 drives in raid 0.

Other Thoughts: I bought this card for a multipurpose ( IIS, MySQL, Email, Stats ) rack server I am building. The server is running dual xeon x5570, and has 48 GB of ram.

I setup a regular sata drive for the primary, then tried various RAID 0 configurations using 6 x 250GB Samsung 840 SSDs. I tried a single SSD, 2 SSDs in RAID 0, 4 SSDs in RAID 0, and 6 SSD in RAID 0. At the same time I tried adjusting the stripe size to see if the helped performance. The card's default is a 64KB stripe. I tried 16KB at the low end and 512KB at the highend. At 16KB I had better speed for smaller transfers, at 512KB I had better speed for larger transfers.

With the stripe size set at 512KB I was able to break 3GB/sec on the 6 x SSD raid 0 array. But when set to a 64KB stripe it would barely hit 1.8 GB /sec.

But since this is for a web server top end is not my concern. What I need is fast IOPs especially at 4KB. The Samsung 840 250GB SSDs are rated for 96,000 IOPs at 4KB for reads.

With a 64KB stripe size I was only able to get 5000 IOPS on a 6 x SSD RAID 0 array. Even when adjusting the stripe size to 16KB I was still only hitting 20K IOPS. Granted I don't expect to break 500K IOPS for 6 SSD, but I was hoping for something over 250K.

What also didn't make sense was these figures were the same no matter how many SSDs were in the Array. 1 SSD had almost the same performance as 6 SSD for transfers under 64KB. After 64KB things start to get better.

Just to make sure it wasn't the SSD drives I installed a single one in my workstation on a Intel ICH10R SATA II port. I was doing close to 50000 IOPS at 4KB.

I have already opened a ticket with HighPoint. At first they were communicating great, but then they were supposed to contact me monday, and here I am the end of tuesday and I haven't heard anything from them.

Hopefully they can release a firmware update to fix the terrible IOPs performance.