Pros: Very fast RAID for this price point, we're talking 400MB to 500MB per second with RAID 5 read. Configures multiple RAID sets great. Configured a RAID 1 (2x640 GB WD) as well as a RAID 5 (6 x 1TB WD), and both RAID still peformed great. Even after splitting the RAID, I still got 400MB per/sec on the RAID 5 and over 100MB per/sec on the RAID 1.

Cons: Raid 10 Speed not as good as they should be. Raid 5 worked great, but the RAID 10 speeds were just mediocre. This card actually does much better with RAID 5 than RAID 10, even on moderately small reads/writes. Motherboard Compatibility - Picky about which MB you use, so are many RAID cards Chip does run a little hot, but it's probably within spec, but just put a slot fan next to it for $5 Be careful about what parts you buy. I have tested this in a Gigabyte GA-EP43 board with WD 1TB Drives (WD1001FALS), Seagate 500GB (ST3500320AS), WD 640GB, and all is fine. You can probably also use any of the newer Gigabyte EP45 motherboards such as the GA-UD3P, 3R, etc... Did not work in some EP35 boards, an MSI, and also 1 Asus had trouble.

Overall Review: You must know a little about RAID, many of the bad reviews I have seen are baloney. Myth # 1 -"after using a drive in it - it makes the drive not work if you need to move the drive to a different RAID or computer" FALSE, I initially created a Raid 5 on this card, but had to move the drives to an Intel RAID, the drives still worked normally. Myth # 2 - "The drives do not always spin up properly." FALSE - I tested Seagate 500GB, WD 650GB, and WD 1TB drives, and they all worked perfectly. I was building several servers so rebooted many times. People, if your drives are not spinning up properly, 9 out of 10 times it is YOUR power supply or you put too much on (1) rail of the PS. Also, many power supplies cannot handle near as much wattage as they claim. Otherwise, it might be a MB compat issue. Myth # 3 - "If you lose a drive in the RAID, the controller cannot recover" FALSE, in three tests I purposefully disabled a drive to "break" the RAID, the RAID re-built just fine

Pros: I configured it with 8 750GB drives running in RAID 5 on a cheapo MSI motherboard with a low-end core2 running XP64 for a single 5.25TB partition. The card worked exactly as expected, and I custom-built an LED array for it's status/error lights. Read/Write speeds max out the Gigabit ethernet connection, cant ask more than that from a file server. I think I got 180 MB/s write speeds when testing it locally, array took about 4-5 hours to configure.

Cons: The software doesnt have the greatest UI I've ever seen. Clearly built by engineers because it is by far function over form.

Overall Review: This is the first RAID system I've built, so it was in part a learning experience, but everything was easy... the only surprise I had was that 32-bit XP cant handle a partition >2TB.

Pros: Upgraded from a RocketRAID 2300 with 4 1TB drives. Moved the 4 drives over to this card and had no problem with the old array being found. Added 2 more drives, did some ORCE and brought my RAID-5 up to 5tb and still have room for 2 more. Speeds are ridiculous - exactly what you would expect out of a RAID array. I can easily cap out a Gig-E network before I cap out my disk reads. Easy installation with Windows Server 2008 Standard.

Cons: The software leaves a bit to be desired. I use the web-based UI since it runs in a headless fileserver. The software has no way of sending warning and error e-mails through a SMTP server using TLS (I want to route it out my Gmail account as my ISP doesn't provide stable SMTP servers).

Overall Review: As stated above - the upgrade path from the 2300 to the 2320 was a piece of cake. I consulted HighPoint's customer support on the issue before purchasing the 2320 to make sure I could simply swap the drives off the old 4-port controller to this guy. Surprisingly enough, HighPoint's customer care responded quickly to my message. With customer support like that, I had no second thoughts about buying this controller.

Pros: Those of you who are having issues.....

Cons: First of all the Mac guy should not be messing with multi HDD arrays if he doesn't understand how static partitions work (IE Linux/Unix/Mac). When you create the RAID 5 like any other controller it is a logical array that the OS sees as a physical disk. If you already have the Array created, then format and partition the disk a resize of the disk will not be automatically used or dynamically expanded by any OS that I am aware of. You have to manually expand the partition. For example you have to do this in cmd for windows, "diskpart" then select the disk, then partition, then type "extend". Depending on the filesystem used for your Mac you would have to do something similar. I'm not a Mac user but I'm sure there is a built in partition manager.

Overall Review: Now for having both onboard and HighPoint RAID enabled on some motherboards. I had the same issue with an Asus PrQ Pro. You have to use the High Point tool that comes with the BIOS download from the HPT website. Its called hptflash.exe. It allows you to enable or disable options on the rom of the card. You are going to want to backup the BIOS and then open it in the config tool. Then choose the config button and disable INT 13 Support. This will disable the card as being bootable. I also change the Time waiting to 1 so the server boots faster. It would be nice if there was documentation for this as I consulted HPT about this issue and they didn't even know about it. Hope this helps some people out as I looked long and hard and couldn't find any info on this.

Pros: I have had this card for about 3 months. Running 2 drives RAID0, 2 drives RAID1, 4 drives RAID5. I have had a drive in the RAID 5 fail and tested the rebuild functionality without any problems. Doesn't seem to affect CPU cycles on Corei7 system, data rates are extremely fast even with all of the ports used in multiple separate RAID sets.

Cons: Disables access to the RAID 5 when it is degraded, kind of annoying but most controllers do that. Card CPU gets very hot without air circulation, recommend using one of those slot exhaust fans.

Pros: *Solid performance with no errors in over a year while being up 24/7. *Expanded RAID5 array 3 times to encompass more drives and all 3 went without incident. *added 2 drives the first time expansion, and 1 each subsequent expansion *live expansion/migration (can add drives to volume ie. RAID 5, and while rebuild occurs, you can still access the files on the volume being expanded upon)

Cons: *obviously slow migration/expansion, due to no on board parity processor, and amount of data stored at the time, however he card performed the process live and I could continue to operate and use the files while the expansion occurred without incident. But I knew this when I purchased it, and used corresponding hardware (see other thoughts) to adjust for lack of parity processor.

Overall Review: Hit the 8 drive max. currently, now looking to buy another card and link with current to expand to 16 drives. However price of card increased and newer updated models exist. Heres my rig: GIGABYTE GA-EP45-UD3P; Intel Core 2 Quad Q8200 2.33GHz LGA 775 95W Quad-Core Processor Model BX80580Q8200; 2 sticks of G.SKILL 4GB 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800 (PC2 6400) Desktop Memory Model F2-6400CL6S-4GBMQ; 8 drives of Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 ST31500341AS 1.5TB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5"; Antec TruePower Quattro TPQ-1000 1000W Continuous Power; Microsoft Windows Vista Ultimate SP1 64-bit for System Builders - OEM

Pros: The price is great for the number of SATA interfaces PCI-E usage is a big plus for flexibility in motherboard choice SMART monitoring E-Mail notification Hot Swap/Spare/Expansion

Cons: Management software could use a redesign, while sufficient, navigation is sometimes inefficient. Checking the SMART values of the drives requires going through a series of clicks for each drive individually. The SMART values themselves are not well explained, just the RAW values are displayed with just an "OK" for the status.

Overall Review: I started with six 750GB Seagates in RAID 5, but switched to five 1TB green WDs about a year later because they run cooler than the Seagates, I'm adding 3 more 1TB WDs now and it has always been RAID 5. Early on one of the 750s died a few weeks after I had moved my data to the array. The array rebuilt 2 or 3 times before I realized I should check the drives(DOH!), I ordered a new 750 installed it, the array rebuilt, and I haven't had any problems since. Rebuilding a 4TB RAID 5 array takes about 7-8 hours. Because I didn't have any friends with enough space to save all my data the migration from 750GB drives to the 1TB drives was tricky. I changed the six 750GB drive array to RAID 0 to free up a slot, and started with three 1TB drives as RAID 0. After I had copied the data over I added the other two 1TB drives and did an online expansion and raid level conversion in the same process. going from three 1TB drives in RAID 0 to five 1TB drives in RAID 5 took 27 hours if I remember right

Pros: Have been running this card for about three months with 3x1.5TB WD Green drives in a RAID 5 on Windows XP x64; solid as a rock so far. Great card for the price, with online RAID expansion and migration. Not sure how the card is going to handle one of the Green non-RAID edition drives falling out; we'll see! If buying now would wait a bit for the WD RE3 large drives due shortly.

Cons: Heatsink on card gets extremely hot, even in a very well ventilated case. Added a 30x8mm fan to it. Vritually silent, and brings it to warm to the touch. Used the Evercool: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16835119046 Documentation and software is a little lacking. Card came with a v1.1 firmware; immediately flashed to 1.7.

Overall Review: Two items of note: In order for Windows XP to see larger than 2TB volume, you need to select a non-standard sector size when building the array. I'd recommend going to full 4k sectors, which will allow a maximum logical disk size of 16TB. Note that this renders the volume unbootable. This is poorly documented; not in the manual, but eventually found it in a Variable Sector document hidden on HighPoint's website. Second item is that there are certain applications that don't run properly on the controller. I'm not sure if it's an XP64 compatibility issue or the controller itself. Mounting ISOs on the array with Daemon Tools and running VMWare virtual machines located on the drive do not work, to name a few. However, this is a data storage card, not a boot card! Overall very happy with it.