HighPoint RocketRAID 2640x1 PCI-Express x1 Four-Port SATA and SAS RAID Controller Card

Pros: Inexpensive SAS controller, really

Cons: software is painful to say the least

Overall Review: I thought it unfair to give this card one egg like the other reviews because it *does* work, however it was challenging to compile under CentOS 5.2 xen kernel. You have to look for the rr26xx driver source (under fedora) and not the rr2644 source provided for CentOS/Redhat on their website. I have not even attempted using the management software yet, but performance with 2 15K SAS drives is acceptable, this was the only card I could find that was SAS and PCI-E 1x which is the only slot I had available.

Pros: Works like a charm. Nice boot screen for Bios on Card. Clean options for RAID and no options for Non-RAID. I am using this with a Hitachi SAS Ultrastar 15K drive in Non-Raid mode for now and it is fast! I also have Raptor and Velociraptor side by side in SATA with no problems. This is as fast as you can go without spending hundreds on a SCSI card.....get one...you will love it!

Cons: Flash First...New OS installs are not as smooth as indicated. Best to MAKE a DOS Boot disk and flash the card BIOS to what you want (Raid or Non-Raid). Disk that comes with it has old Bios and drivers, so go to the Highpoint website. Then use a flash drive or floppy to install the appropriate driver on new OS install. It is easy for tekkies! Believe it or not, a Windows 98 Boot disk (floppy)works better than the bootable flash drives on the Vista installs.

Overall Review: Cables are great quality, more than most need, and REALLY LONG! Don't forget to buy a jumper/extension for the drive indicator LED.

Pros: 4 Ports, very nice and long cables included, easy menu, quick and simple firmware update, ease of options in swapping in and out drives, creating and recreating arrays, and ease of replacing bad drives if needed.

Cons: Really none for the price.

Overall Review: I ran this on a couple of different machines just to test it out and stretch its legs out of curiosity. On the PCI E x1 interface there are speed limitations. So while much more expensive PCIE x8 cards will be able to do 300-400 etc. read/write speeds this one simply doesn't have the bandwidth. Regardless I was able to get 2 Hitachi 450GB drives to do 160 on read tests in a mirrored RAID configuration and 210 on read tests in a striped RAID configuration. That compares to 95-100 that my WD 1TB Black Edition drive tests at. Thus all-in-all this card at this price is easy to use and while the performance isn't as fast as I know some other cards boast, the fact that the price is so much lower makes this a great buy for anyone looking to use SAS in RAID but trying to save a bit of money.

Pros: Relatively Cheap

Cons: Drivers are not updated to work on modern Linux Operating Systems. They claim support for 3.0+ Linux Kernel, but the source driver files are just broken. Thankfully someone out there decided to put a patch on one of the forums to make it work. Although even with the patch, you still have to re-make and install the driver every time you do a kernel update (which happens often on Ubuntu). I ended up settling on CentOS 6 simply because they use an older 2.X kernel. Also, manufacturer support does not respond.

Overall Review: I've wasted many hours trying to get this working. If you value your time and sanity, then spend a few extra bucks and get one of the more reputable ones.

Pros: Works as advertised, used for running some older Maxtor SAS HDs. All I need is one or two fast HD not in RAID environment and it is good for it.

Cons: Beware it is x1 slot, but that is what I need. So far so good

Pros: This card went right in and worked perfectly. The drivers for Vista 64 bit work fine, and I was able to setup 2x Fujitsu 15k rpm drives in RAID 0 to boot from and hold the OS, as well as 2x 7200rpm SATA drives in a second RAID 0 for data. The management software loaded without issue in less than 5 minutes. HD Tach shows a sustained data read of over 164MB on the SAS drives, and 80-90Mb/sec on the SATA. Both use less than 4% cpu.

Cons: If I wanted to go to 3 or 4 SAS drives in RAID 0, then the 1x PCE-E slot would max out at its limit of 250Mb/sec. If you want to do that, there is a nearly identical 4x card. As with any RAID controller, boot time is a bit longer due to drive/stripe detection, but 5-10 seconds in BIOS is more than made up for once the OS starts loading.

Overall Review: I only had a 1x slot free or I would have opted for the 4x card. For the combined price of the SAS drives and this controller you would be hard pressed to match this level of performance. Of course RAID 0 is not for critical apps, but as a gaming/video editing box that has regular backups this is a very solid, fast way to go. This card is replacing the only other 1x SAS RAID controller I could find here. That card was very problematic when booting. It is SUCH a relief to have this card which works every time. Note that for SATA drives in a 2 disk RAID 0 array you won't see a lot of improvement over most MB implementations. This card needs more SATA drives or faster drives (such as SAS) to really shine.

Pros: cheap 4port SAS controller

Cons: DOES NOT WORK ON LINUX. Short of rebuilding the driver from scratch, we were not able to get an OS installed natively. The driver provided on site / with product is broken and requires to go in hoops to figure out. We ended up porting a driver for these to get them to work but decided that it was to risky for production environment and simply returned them to newegg. manufacturer claims that it is linux compatible. As a Kernel developer myself, i can say that my 2-year-old son can program a better driver than what has been provided. We have tried installing this on Centos 5, Fedora 12, Ubuntu 9.10, SUSE, Debian, FreeBSD (UNIX) ... need i say more!!!

Overall Review: I will never use nor recommend HighPoint ever again.

Pros: Works well, and fast.

Cons: Will not RAID 1 the OS. It wants to intialize the drives which deletes them, and if not part of a RAID set, Windows 7 won't recognize them either. Can't JBOD one disk and change it to RAID 1 either, it deletes it. You probably can install Windows on a RAID set, but if you have any crash, you won't be able to re-RAID the OS. Without deleting it. This has forced me to add another drive just for Windows, so I can use my double RAID 1 sets for data. Helpful, but not at all wonderful. Being one that has used RAID ever since it debuted on the first SIL cards, this is a HUGE disapointment.

Overall Review: My old Highpoint worked like the Sil controllers, just add a mirror and it will mirror it from the main drive while you wait. Now it wants to initialize the drives which deletes them. Not what I want or believed I'd ever have to settle for, but I feel naked without RAID 1. This forces me to run Windows on a single drive, remap all of MY Documents, remap all the storage of all my programs, and write bat files to back up the programs that wouldn't remap. To call this a pain is the understatement of the year. Luckily, Windows 7 does have a backup and image backup utility. Is Bill Gates so fearful someone might actually have a mirror bootable image of his precious software? Well, I have data dating back over 20 years because of hard drive backup and RAID, he can kiss my a**!