Pros: I purchased this card as a special with the 1TB hard drive so I only spent $250 or so on the card. Not bad for a card that has the horsepower that this one has! Very fast card; works well as a file/media server. Frankly I don't understand why some are giving it such a poor rating. Great card! So much better than MB RAID. The card has taken a mix and match of older and newer MAXTOR and WD drives without a problem. I'm currently running a 1.5 TB RAID-5 and a 500 GB RAID-5 and still have one slot open. Easy to migrate from RAID-1 to RAID-5. Fits in my unused PCIe x16 slot without a problem and was found immediately. FAST!!!

Cons: This card is an Enterprise Level card and does not come with SATA cables. $50 will buy you the cables from NewEgg for 8 drives. The 30 to 40 seconds needed for boot are a bit longer than average, but really not a problem if you use it as a 24x7 server like I do.

Overall Review: Be careful of creating a set above 2TB. I understand that its possible by playing with the block size, but for me its easier to just create another RAID set. I may buy one more 500 GB drive to migrate my 1.5 TB set to RAID-6 for the extra protection. I recommend that you read the manual before you install the card.

Pros: Good price for high performance RAID card that supports RAID6. SAS expanders can be used to increase the number of supported drives to 128. Once I try some (compatible) new drives, I will be able to get a better idea of how well it all works. Web management is easy to use. Using with a Gigabyte EP45-DS4P and seems to boot and initialize fairly quickly (about 10 seconds from what I can tell).

Cons: SATA compatibility could be better, and the compatibility list is not frequently updated. I was hoping to use the GreenPower drives (WD15EADS), but the card locks up when writing to them when in a RAID5 or RAID6 array. Building seems to go fine, but obviously the drives are not fully compatible (I tried with TLER enabled as well). I was unable to reproduce the problems on some older 500GB WD RE drives I had, so it's obviously a compatibility issue with the drives. I assume the 2.0TB Greenpower drives will have the same problem. Also, I've heard that the Seagate 1.5TB drives with the C-series firmware do not work, which is what is currently shipping on most of the newer Seagates. The older SD-series firmware appears to work fine, I've heard.

Overall Review: Right now it seems the largest usable drive is 1.0TB (unless you happen to get one of the older firmware 1.5TB Seagates). Perhaps the card's firmware will be updated to support the WD15EADS/WD20EADS, but I don't have time to find out. Samsung should be coming out with some 1.5TB and 2.0TB drives later this year that may be compatible. The 1.0TB version is, so that's a good sign. I'm not sure if anyone has tried the new WD RE4-GP 2.0TB GreenPower drives, but they may or may not work. I may try them even though they aren't yet on the compatibility list because I'd prefer to use 1.5TB+ drives.

Pros: I've had this card for just about or just over a year. It works great. I'm running it with 4 WD 500G Black drives in RAID 5. Vista had no problems with it, and Win 7 has no issues with it. I had 3 Seagate 500G drives in RAID 5 at first, but as is so common with the Seagate ST3500320AS, one died. The 4320 did EXACTLY as advertised. It dropped down to the 2 working drives, alarm ringing and all. I tried to find another Seagate to replace the bad one, but by that time, no one carried that buggy model any more. So I bought 4 WD Blacks. I built the new array, and copied over the data from the crippled Seagate array, perfectly. That was last summer and I've been running SOLID ever since.

Cons: None that I have experienced. I even had a disk failure, and the card worked perfectly through that situation.

Overall Review: I'm running the card on an EVGA 780i SLI board with a Intell EE QX9650. (Purchased both here in Feb '08.) Later I added the 4320 in between a pair of 9800GTX cards, and had no issues other than the EVGA, occasionally not seeing the 4320 on reboot with SLI enabled. If I disabled SLI (pull the bridge cable,) it would see the card again. I point to the 780i and it's PCI-Express for that glitch. A couple months ago, I replaced the two 9800's with a single (no Crossfire on an Nvidia board, oh well no big deal) ATI 5870 (XFX). The machine still rocks, and no disappearing 4320. Again, I blame the 780i for that, NOT the 4320. Another thought. Don't mismatch drives with RAID. It is a bad practice, and you will probably regret it, either with a failure, or poor performance. Run identical model drives in your arrays. That is unless of course you are running JBOD, even then I'd be cautious.

Pros: This is exactly what I was loooking for in a RAID 5 controller. The price is right and it has all of the features I need for my system (including the Seagate ES 2.1TB disks I had just purchased). I run a small business, and needed a reliable hardware RAID controller; but at the right price (of course). I was not sure about their service and support, after reading some negative reviews. I took the risk, and got to find out for myself. I gave them a call to check about compatibility with the Seagate ES 2.1 drives with their controller. I was pleasantly surprised when the phone was answered by a live human - they assured me that my drives were compatible with this controller (this was indeed true). I also discovered that I could register the card, and report problems using their new web support system - engineer/support staff answer questions directly through the online interface. Overall I am very happy with the product - my data is secure, and everything works as advertised.

Cons: none

Overall Review: For those on the fence: other companies have similar products, but at twice the price.

Pros: I use this card in a home media server running Vista-32 with a Gig-E NIC and a 5 drive Raid-5. It replaced (upgraded) the 4-drive Motherboard Raid-5 I was using. After I added the card, I was amazed to see it transfer files from a Windows 7rc x64 machine to a Vista-32 machine across the network at 85-90% NIC utilization. I rechecked the transfer rates, verified that the files were intact, and then did it several times to be sure. Its true. If you want to transfer huge files this card will increase your throughout by 2 to 3 times. My four node home network went from transfer rates of 30-35% (on Gig-E NICS) to the server the 85-90% previously mentioned. The only change being the 4320 cards and the extra drive. Raid 6! I think I'll spring for another drive to go to RAID 6, just to be sure that my files are safe.

Cons: GOOFY name! - "Rocket Raid"?! Come on - How can you tell someone that your pride and joy computer system has a "Rocket Raid" controller? Sigh... :} Highpoint needs to update their firmware to make more drives compatible with their card. While I have not personally had any issues with Seagate and WD drives, I see that several others have. It makes me just a bit leery of buying drives when I don't know if the card will support them. Why not put the SATA cables in the kit? The SAS cables are rarely going to be used by the average home user.

Overall Review: No doubt someone will say that the extra drive allows faster transfer which will increase the network throughput. While I know this to be true, I don't believe that one drive makes this much of a difference. The cache also is a factor, but only for files smaller than the cache itself. I'm backing up my DVDs, and Blue-rays, and the smallest of these files is a couple gigs. Nope, its all in the card and at $300 it's a steal. Lets face it, at the $250-$350 price point it is selling at now, you will get home enthusiasts all over this. The next step up (Areca or Adaptec) will be double the cost and really only provides marginal speed benefits, but substantial compatibility and customer support benefits. I feel that this card should be considered to be a home enthusiast card and Highpoint should not try to compete with the SAS crowd.

Pros: SAS mini connectors make for a very neat cable package. The hardware acceleration makes a very noticeable increase in RAID performance over MB based software RAID. The ability to move RAID to another MB with no loss of data is also a big plus.

Cons: The 45 seconds the hardware takes during boot time to wait for drives to come up does increase your boot time. This really is workstation class hardware and not desktop hardware, so that goes with the territory. Also, there are some capacitors on my MB that JUST clear this card. If the caps had been 1/16" taller, it wouldn't have fit.

Overall Review: With four Seagate 320GB ES drives on my P5B Deluxe RAID in RAID5, I was seeing a consistent 150MB/s read speeds. When I upgraded to this card, I did add one more drive, so it's not a complete apples to apples comparison, but with five Seagate 320GB ES drives on this card in RAID5 I am consistently seeing 300MB/s read speeds. On the old array, writes were noticeably slower. It would take almost twice as long to install a game to the array versus installing it to the stand alone system disk (also a Seagate 320GB ES drive). Definitely noticeable! After the upgrade, installs to this RAID5 are about 50% FASTER than the same game installs to the new system disk, a WD VelociRaptor 300GB drive. All in all, definitely worth it at the sale price!

Pros: This is my second time building a server for small sized company and I decided to give highpoint a shot. Performed very well, installed on Windows Server 2003 x64 edition without problems. Considering the $329 price point, this is a steal. Does RAID 5 extremely fast with 6 WD caviar black. Similar cards in this category costs $600+.

Cons: User manual could use some improvements. Kinda ugly GUI (but thats not what this card is for right?)

Overall Review: This product is a bit rough, needs some more polishing on its user interface and tweaking in the drivers (to squeeze out some higher I/O per seconds. However, I cannot complain about its performance. Got the raw horsepower to match the $600+ cards at half the price.

Pros: I've been using the 4320 for 16 months now, without an issue. Upon initial installation, I did pull a drive to ensure proper rebuild of my +2TB array using 4x750GB Seagates. Worked as expected. The benchmarks I've ran put my RAID 5 configuration on par with the latest SSD (single), if not slightly faster, but with MUCH more space. I'm using it with a 5 bay Icy Dock drive storage system. No issues with XP, Win7x64, VMWare workstation, Acronis, and Ghost applications. The greatest feature is the ability to rapidly change boot partitions between different OSes w/o having to configure multiboot within the OS. I can leave my other OSes offline. The ability to create different RAID partitions on the same disks is valuable. I have a RAID0 & a RAID5 for my two OSes and one RAID5 for data. I can't wait to attached a few SSDs.

Cons: None, because I never needed tech support!

Overall Review: Make sure you create your OS array first since it will be the fastest. Hard drives use the fastest part of the drive initally. There was about a 50MB/s difference between creating the OS partition before the DATA partition in my initial benchmarks. I paid $333 for mine when it was onsale last year and was very glad to do so. My 2TB is almost used up in a year and now I'm looking for more drive space (75GB left)!