Question 1

Do you know if this controller can handle (4) 500 GB drives, all with same spindle speed but different size cache in Raid 5?

Accepted Answer

I have 3 of these:Western Digital WD Green WD10EZRX 1TB IntelliPower SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive Bare Drive; bad mamma jammas and they work great. Don't now about the different cache size though

Question 2

Excuse my ignorance, but, can this controller be run in a non-raid status?

Thanks

Accepted Answer

Yes, it can.  it's a bit tricky in getting this controller to work.  But, the technical support staff at HighPoint are pretty good and helping out.   Hope that helps.

Question 3

First raid,
Wanting windows 7 compatibility and reliability.
Raid 1
Ability to read info off of drives even if everything fails so no special structure to writing.
Using 6gbs disks and wanting to have 4 disks two separate 1 gb storage drives at the same time.

What should I go with?

Accepted Answer

I have this card curently setup in in my home in a RAID 5 configuration using (4) 1Tb, 3GBPS drives.  Works well for streaming Blu-Ray and DVD movies.  I opted to go with RAID 5 due to extended capacity.  Using (4) drives in a RAID 1 configuration (as you describe) will net you 2Tb of storage, while the same drives configured in a RAID 5 configuration will net 3Tb of storage.

Also, if a single drive fails in a RAID 5 configuration the array can be recovered by replacing the failed drive.  The problem with RAID 5 is IF the controller card fails, a lot of times it requires an identical controller to rebuild the array.  However, the lifecycle of HighPoint products are ridiculously extended (check their current product line) and if you really want to protect your data, at the price of this card you can reasonably afford to stock a spare like I do.

Good luck to you.

Question 4

How many SAS cables come with this card?

Accepted Answer

I have one of these cards running a RAID 10  with four 1TB disks.  I would like to add some spares in case on of the disks go down.  Can I add another one of these cards to add some spares?

Question 5

I have one of these cards running a RAID 10 with four 1TB disks. I would like to add some spares in case on of the disks go down. Can I add another one of these cards to add some spares?

Accepted Answer

I'm fairly sure that it doesn't work like that, because they have to be on the same controller. I would back up my data and buy a raid card that has the amount of sata ports you need and then and restore the data to the new array.

Question 6

First raid,
Wanting windows 7 compatibility and reliability.
Ability to read info off of drives even if everything fails so no special structure to writing.
Using 6gbs disks and wanting to have 4 disks two seperate 1 gb storage drives at the same time.

What should I go with?

Accepted Answer

I had very bad experience with this card. I does have jbod settings, with no special writing requirements, set through firmware on the card. After I set everything up, I tested it with a single 3TB 3gbs SATA drive. On boot, it corrupted the partition table and took about 4 hours to recovery (didn't recover using this card, placed the drive in an onboard SATA connection for that). Thinking it was an accident, I verified all software, checked an update, checked BIOS, and tried again. Same result. Due to that, I decided to upgrade my drives instead, seemed safer.

Question 7

What SAS cable would I use?  Landed two 3tb SAS disks that I am looking to run under Win 7 64 bit.

Accepted Answer

Sorry, couldn't tell you. I bought it for the 4 port sata jbod functionality, but after the card wiped two HDDs on install successively, I haven't used it since the day I got it

Question 8

Does card support Windows Small Business Server 2011?

Accepted Answer

yes

Question 9

My question is if this card fails after few years & if the same card is not available anymore will we be able to retrieve the data? Can we switch over another brand and still be able to retrieve the data?

Accepted Answer

Yes, only by purchasing the latest model of this card, or a more expensive model.

Question 10

Can this card be used to create two mirrored volumes (Logical Drives) of 2 HHDs (total of 4 HDDs as 2 mirrorred disk volumes) wherein 4 TB Drives are used?

Accepted Answer

yes.  This is 2 pair of RAID1 mirrors.

Questions & Answers