Question 1

HighPoint Rocket 640L PCI-Express 2.0 x4 Low Profile SATA III (6.0Gb/s) RAID Controller Card

Will this card support 3TB drives?

Accepted Answer

Yes, I was running 2 x Seagate NAS HDD ST3000VN000 3TB 64MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s Internal Hard Drive in RAID 0. It worked fine if I didn't transfer a ton of data to them at one time.

Question 2

Does this support RAID 5?

Accepted Answer

Note carefully whether you are looking at Rocket 640L or
Rocket RAID 640L.  The former is not a RAID controller, it is just a way to attach 4 SATA drives into an expansion slot.
Those doing Linux & doing software RAID, like with mdadm, can use the Rocket (non-RAID) card.  Win8 is compatible with this card, & you can do storage spaces.
But if you want Win8 OS installed with striping RAID, for example to attain fast boot, you must use the motherboard's built-in RAID facility on the motherboard's multiple SATA jacks, or 
buy a RAID controller that can handle Win8 booting via RAID.

Question 3

Are Windows 10 drivers available for this card?

Accepted Answer

I don't know about the drivers for windows 10, but if you intend to use the card for RAID, I STRONGLY recommend you avoid it.  It does NOT work correctly as a RAID solution.  I still use the card, but only as a controller for my non RAID drives.  It works great that way.

When first setting it up, I set it to RAID mode, and it blew away my drives entirely without warning.  Just heard a click, and all my data was gone.  No warning, no chance to cancel, just set RAID mode, and boom.  Gone.  I proceeded, as it was too late, but no matter what I tried, I could not get the system working in RAID configuration. (I am no stranger to setting up RAID)
Fortunately, I keep backups, but it was a real pain to undo the damage.  Find a better card.

Question 4

I got a Sandisk Extreme II but my mainboard only supports sata II so will this allow me to get the advertised 500mb\s from my ssd?

Accepted Answer

Hello,

Yes, and yes.  My motherboard only had SATA2, and my SSD's were SATA3 (Sandisk 64GB x 4).  I was limited by the board and the bus speed.  So, I bought this card, did a backup, and then made my new RAID-0 array using this card.  I went from 465MB/s to 630MB/s, which was a very noticable boost.  With Windows 8, all I did was install the driver before I did the backup, then the restore went perfect and I was up and running in about 30 minutes.  I used Acronis 2013 to do this.  My motherboard was a MSI 7522 with a 6 core Xeon CPU.  IF you have SATA3 SSD's and want to truly unlock their speed to full potential, this is the card to do it with.  FYI -  it is based on the Marvell chipset, so Highpoint is not the only manf. making a card to do this.  However, the support, driver, and RAID utilities from Highpoint as well as the support are always top notch (I have over a dozen HPT cards).

Enjoy!

Question 5

Can you buy two of these cards and run 8 (hypothetical) drives in one Raid array? Or..can you run 2 individual arrays, one for each card?

Does this card support raid 6?

Accepted Answer

I only bought one card and am only running one array.  However, I loaded the array with 4 OWC Mercury SSD's and they scream.  Array has been online (reliable) for 5 months now.  That's all I got for you. Good luck.

Question 6

Does this card support 6Gbps to all 4 connectors at the same time?

Accepted Answer

No card can support 6 Gbps to several connectors at once. They're limited by the PCI 2.0 x4 speed of 2GBPS. (16gbps.) Any given card can give theoretical service to 2.5 SATA slots. This hardly matters, however, because you can saturate every SATA slot with the fastest drive on the market and still not approach either connection bottleneck. Seriously - your only bottleneck is your drive or RAID.

Question 7

is this a 2nd gen version, the 2nd gen supports raid 5 ?

Accepted Answer

I think I remember seeing #5 on the config.  I just use it to put 4 4tb reds together and mount the drives individually to folders on the main 3tb

Question 8

Can this be used to boot on a 2010 Mac Pro?

Accepted Answer

Boot a 2010 mac pro? seriously? this is your question ? ... check 'ignorant' and move on with your day.

Question 9

Looking at the pictures, I don't see leads going anywhere from the 3rd and 4th PCIe data lanes (pins 23-30).  Does this card only run as a 2-lane PCIe controller? Or is there actually circuitry for the 3rd and 4th lanes in there that I can't see in the pictures?  This is to say, does it perform at 4Gbps or 8Gbps maximum?

Accepted Answer

I only got x2 links being established.  Either at PCI-E 1.0 or 2.0 speeds.

Questions & Answers