HighPoint RocketRAID 4310 PCI-Express x8 Four-Port SATA and SAS HARDWARE RAID Controller Card

Pros: I set out to buy this RocketRAID 4310 controller for another of my systems which has 4 WD green drives. At first I was hesitant but because the price was in my budget range and NewEgg has such a good return policy I decided to find out if it was worth the time and effort to purchase this product. It turned out pretty awesome RAID 5 on 4 x WD 2TBs drives reached over 450MB/s.

Cons: However, the performance with OCZ vertex drives were really unstable and same set up with Adaptec 5405 also having the same problem system hang when running Write performance.

Overall Review: I saw a review on a site called barefeats and it showed OCZ drives have awesome performance over 800MB/s with rocketraid 2310 & 3510. I will check out either one of these card as soon as I have enough cash for my next purchase!!

Pros: This controller card was extremely easy to set up. You do not need a high level or expertise to set this up. Other reviews say you do, and that the manual is lacking, but I do not agree. It couldn't have been easier. Yes, you need to understand what an array is, that you may need XP drivers on a floppy, and other basic stuff, but the manual covered all that. I did a RAID 0 with 2 Velociraptors and had the OS installing in less than thirty minutes. No conflicts or problems since, and it's been three weeks. System runs super fast. Of course Newegg is the best...

Cons: No real cons. Of course, it would be great if Highpoint included the necessary SAS to SATA connector, but since some may not need it, I understand why they do not include it. Why make everyone pay more when only some will use it? So no lost eggs...but would've been nice.

Overall Review: I got mine during the promo period for $229. Pretty much a steal at that price. Still a steal at $319 though, and am considering picking up another for my other PC. This is definitely a recommended upgrade...can't wait until SSD's drop enough, and I'll pull the Velocipators out and put two 256GB in RAID 0 on this card...

Pros: Large amount of OS'es supported, both Windows and Linux....and Vmware. Perhaps it's not vmware certified, but there is a way to get it to work in esxi. It took me about 3 hours to figure it out though. Very frustrating.

Cons: Need to manually edit the vmware.xml file to get it to work. High degree of knowledge needed, and this really shouldn't be that difficult. The Highpoint guys need to get their coding straight. See below for my instructions.

Overall Review: Download their v1.6 tar file, open it, mount the iso inside of that (I used Ubuntu), navigate inside that iso to find the offline-bundle folder, and in that is a zip file with a really long file name (hpt-hptiop...etc). Open that zip file, find the metadata.zip file, open THAT one up, and open the vmware.xml file. Search for and replace all occurrences where it says version="4.0" or version="4.0.0" with version="4.*". There are about 5 occurences. These version numbers indicate the version of esxi you are using. If you are using 4.1, then putting in the wildcard asterisk makes it all okay. Save the xml file, and keep the entire zip structure otherwise intact. Copy the file into a datastore or your vmware file system, and then run the following command esxupdate --bundle=<put the really long hpt filename here.zip> update and I'll be da*mned if it doesn't work.

Pros: Outstanding RAID card! Setup could not be easier. Took about 4 hours to format 4 WD 1TB Enterprise drives into a RAID 5. Setup card in Windows 7 without incident. No driver problems at all. The boot delay is not all that long as some have commented

Cons: Manual is OK, but not a lot of great detail so a knowledge of RAID is helpful. If setting up an array beyond 2TB you need to be aware of the 2TB limitation. In Win 7 and Vista you can always use the GPT format if using them for storage and not to boot.

Overall Review: If you are looking for an economical RAID card I would highly recommend this card and encouraging you to not pay too much attention to the negative reviews on here. Given the ease and simplicity of setting this card up, my guess is that most of the people leaving negative reviews do not really have a "High Understanding" of RAID as they often indicate in their tech knowledge rating. People are a lot more prone to post a negative review than positive, but you will notice all the positive reviews for this card indicate, as I have, that setup is very simple. I can't comment on drive compatibility though, as I used the WD Enterprise Drives listed on their compatibility list. I have had no trouble with these drives though. I'm running 4 1TB drives in RAID 5 for video capture and they are smoking fast on this controller. I plan to purchase an second card for my system. I hope this review is helpful to someone...

Pros: On board CPU and dedicated cache. Affordable and easy to operate. Works great with Windows 7 RTM.

Cons: Need to purchase an addition cable to use with SATA. Add's a few seconds to your boot time for the card to start up.

Overall Review: I had some issues flashing the device and it becoming inoperable when I flashed via the Web UI. The issue is you must flash in DOS if you have a problem and they have a flash image that is 2mb so you have to figure out something other than a floppy, I ended up doing a bootable USB stick.

Pros: Fast and reliable card. 256 MB on board RAM. Setup was rather simple. My 4 x 146GB 15K SAS Fujitsu drives are benchmarking at 200 MB/sec read while using 64 K Blocks in RAID 10. I am using this on a SuperMicro 1U rack server 6014h-32.

Cons: It took several hours to initialize the drives. It supports a backup battery ( enabling safe Write caching ) but does not come with one. The additional Backup battery is expensive. Does not come with a MiniSAS to SATA adapter cable, only a MiniSAS to MiniSAS cable. So make sure you add one of those to your cart as well and yeah that is expensive too.

Overall Review: The card performs well on Windows Server 2008 R2 and supports a wide range of block sizes. Its performing about 20 MB/sec faster than my workstation's setup which is the same drives but in RAID 0 and only two of them, using the built in marvel controller that came with my ASUS motherboard. For anyone with a supermicro server, I highly recommend getting a card like this, instead of using the built in controller, or the addon card they sell. If anyone is interested I have posted benchmarks of this on my blog. So yeah its expensive, but you get what you pay for. As always newegg shipped it quickly

Pros: I purchased this product from newegg in June of 2010. It has worked perfectly since the day I installed it. I purchased it to replace an onboard Intel motherboard controller that kept dropping disks from an array. I run a RAID 10 array with four WD RE3 1TB drives. I get excellent read performance (up to 240 MB/s sequential read) and I have never had a single dropped disk or other error recovery problem. The ROM loader for this array is large and takes time to start, but it is worth it! The management software is web based and connects to a locally installed service. It provides SMART info for each individual disk. I would recommend this controller to anyone looking for a moderately priced 4-disk controller. It is worth the money!

Cons: The included SAS to SATA cable is for only 1 disk. You must purchase the 4 disk cable separately.

Overall Review: I had a small problem with the ROM image failing to load in my system when an additional RAID controller card was installed. I resolved it by disabling other devices on the motherboard. I won't subtract an egg because my understanding is that there is VERY limited ROM space in BIOS based systems... this is not a fault of the product.

Pros: Based on the other reviews, I figure this is a good device, but, there are limitations. NewEgg is a great vendor, I've had nothing but great delivery and products from them.

Cons: Do your homework, I was not extensive enough. There is a compatibility list on their website, read it! I didn't. Therefore, it appears that my dell motherboard on my xps 630i is not compatible, nor are my WD 1.5 Tb Caviar Green drives. I was planning on doing RAID 5.

Overall Review: Now for the clencher. Call their support line and listen to their recording because that is all you're going to get. There is no immediate live support. To top it off, their recording says they will be shut down from Dec 25, 2008 to sometime in Jan 09. What!!!! This is March 2010!!!! So, I figure they closed their facility in the U.S. and are operating soley from their international offices. Yes, there is web support, but it is by email, not a chat situation. Really, give me a break. So, I will give this to my son, he can buy the MB that it works with and the drives that work with it and maybe, just maybe, things will go fine for him.