HighPoint RocketRAID 640 PCI-Express 2.0 x4 SATA III (6.0Gb/s) Controller Card

Pros: See OTHER THOUGHTS below. Low price for full SATA III bandwidth. Handles up to 4 hard drives.

Cons: Poor instructions. Poor tech support.

Overall Review: First, REMOVE the POWER CORD then plug in the card to an available PCI-x4 slot on your motherboard. But DO NOT connect any hard drives to it at this time. Replace the power cord. Boot up the computer. Use the supplied CD to install the drivers and software. The card won't work without the drivers! Reboot the computer. It will "hang" for 15 to 20 seconds while it hunts around .... After fully booting up, check in Device Manager to make sure the card is correctly installed (no yellow signs). Now, Shut Down the computer completely and REMOVE THE POWER CORD. Open the case and connect one or more hard drives or SSDs to the SATA ports on the card using the supplied SATA cables. Boot up the computer. During boot up the card will search for attached hard drives for about 15 to 20 seconds. Then boot up should continue. If it's possible to avoid that 15 to 20 second delay during boot up, I have not discovered how to do that.

Pros: Fast card, run it with 2 x C300's 256GB and 2 x WD Velociraptors 600GB. I get 440MB seq. write and 720MB seq. read with the two SSD's. That's above Sata 6Gb/s AND the crucial specs for the SSD! lol. 4KB random writes and reads are good, too. Installed Win 7 like described in a Microsoft Knowledge Base article. Installed on a Gigabyte GA-X58-UD7 Motherboard.

Cons: - takes away some boot time because it has to initialize first, but that was expected from an add-on controller - Installation was tricky so I can understand some previous bad reviews (not all!), but if you read the manual and follow some discussions out there, no big deal

Overall Review: -Internal Marvell Controller must be disabled (was no big deal, because I wanted to replace that anyway, since it is slow as hell) -To "boot from another controller" issue in another review, there is a work around described in the readme.txt on the driver disk -To the missing Win 7 driver issue, they are on the disk. I don't know what you're talking about? -No boot up from HPT640 issue: You need to make sure that a) you're motherboard is compatible and then b) select the SCSI Raid on the Controller as your first boot device. -Win7 install issue: It's a Microsoft problem and there is a Knowledge base article about it that describes exactly how to do it! In general when I read the previous bad reviews all I can say is, if you don't know what you're doing, stay away from the tricky stuff or let someone do it, who knows what the hell they're doing. I couldn't be happier with the card, run it fine with 2 SSD's and 2 Veloci's on Win 7 Ultimate 64-bit.

Pros: After having the card for a few months, I thought I would follow up with a positive support experience. A lot of people have complained that this card will not allow the system to boot, or that it freezes to a black screen with a blinking cursor. If it does this, just hit the END key. You then need to flash the firmware and us the flasher to disable INT13. A lot of folks flash the AHCI firmware to this card and forget to do this (including me), resulting in the black screen of personal reflection and introspection. Also be aware that because this is TWO controllers on a PCI-e switch, there are TWO firmware flashes to be done. The flasher will do these automatically, but you MUST PAY ATTENTION during the process to make sure both controllers get the same F/W. Their support staff was valuable in helping me figure out how to save my card rather than RMA it. Disabling INT13 does NOT render the card unbootable. Any modern BIOS will still be able to boot to this card.

Cons: One thing I did not mention before was that, because this is only a 4 lane PCIe card, it will become bandwidth starved with 4 6Gbps drives on it, since one PCIe 2.0 lane is only 5Gb/s. They really should have made this a x8, but I guess losing 1Gb/s per drive isn't that terrible.

Overall Review: Four Intel 520 Cherryville 240GB SSDs in a Raid0 stripe on this card perform amazingly - about 1.6GB/sec sequential read. Windows boots before the logo even starts to appear.

Pros: So its a PCI 4x SATAIII card with 4 ports that work.

Cons: As others have stated, getting a system to boot off a disk not on this card is a huge hassle. I was skeptical of this issue as were others. I have a SSD on local on-board connectors and 3 3TB SATA III drives in a RAID5 array on this card. The system is one of AMD's new A8 APU system on a Gigabyte GA-A75MUD2H motherboard. I was never successful with the on-board RAID system and a RAID 5 array of 3TB drives (they kept showing as individual drives) so i bought this card. As others have said to get a system with a boot drive not on this card you have to re-flash the firmware with the 1.0 release (latest on website) with the /C switch then disable the Reallocate EBDA and Init13. High Point get your act together how did this make it past testing

Overall Review: In order to complete this process do this. FYI: the gui tool dosent appear to run on Win7X64 1) Google Freedos + USB and follow the instructions on creating a DOS boot stick 2) Download the firmware from High points site http://www.highpoint-tech.cn/BIOS_Driver/rr64x/BIOS/rr640-bios-v1.0-100107.zip 3) unzip the contents then copy the files to the "flash" dir on the created USB stick 4) make sure there is no array defined on the card (ctrl + h at boot) and delete any configs 5) set BIOS to boot from USB 6) Boot from the USB stick (press enter when it says BOOT) 7) navigate to flash dir 8) run load.exe /C and type the BIOS file name when prompted, then Set the Reallocate EBDA and Init13 to disabled 9) save the backups and configs and let it do its flash thing 10) reboot and set the bios to boot from whatever media you want first IE CD then set the HD boot priority to the desired drive (in my case the SSD) 11) Install OS then install raid drivers then co

Pros: Good automatic RAID rebuild maintenance options provided. Works well for the price, as advertised, if you configure your motherboard BIOS properly.

Cons: I had to troubleshoot this for weeks until I finally figured out what to do. HighTech support was slow to respond and not helpful providing only minimal information that did not address the problem. In my case, I have an EVGA SR-2 and the RocketRAID 640 BIOS conflicted with my Marvell SATA III BIOS in the boot sequence, so I could not boot up until I disabled Marvell SATA III to remove it from the BIOS boot sequence.

Overall Review: Great product that needs better support and troubleshooting FAQ info from HighPoint Technologies. Bottom Line: If you don't configure your motherboard BIOS properly, the RocketRAID BIOS can interfere with other BIOS settings in your boot sequence, especially the Marvell SATA III chipset. Q: Why is the BIOS stuck at version 1.0 after all these months/years?!

Pros: The card is simple to work with in the bios and web interface. The web interface allows you to view if there are any health problems with your hard drives and e-mail a report of failure. The card supports hot stand-by which is nice.

Cons: I wish the controller had a fast boot time. That is why I took off one egg. However, the card only requires about 60 sec.

Overall Review: This card is running 2 SSD Vertex 2 Raid 0, WD500GB Black, and a WD1TB Black (6Gb interface). I don't typically write reviews but this card is getting a lot of inaccurate bashing.

Pros: inexpensive, email notifications, lots of raid options

Cons: configuration can be complicated

Overall Review: I'm gonna save you some trouble and dramatically increase the chances of this card working for you. When you get the card grab a flash drive and the HP USB Disk Storage Format Tool and some DOS files. Then download the latest BIOS for the card from the Highpoint website. Make the flash drive a bootable dos disk (via HP tool, do google search) and then copy Highpoint files over. Boot off the flash drive and go to the folder where you copied the files. Run "load.exe -c rr640.v10" (or whatever the bios file is). You will see a menu with some options. If you are NOT going to boot off the card DISABLE the following INT13 and Reallocate EBDA. If you ARE going to boot off the card make sure INT13 is ENABLED and Reallocate EBDA is DISABLED. Hit enter (F10?), flash the bios, reboot. Now setup your card in the OS. Make sure to grab the Web GUI too. Enable email notifications so you know if you are having any disk problems. Enjoy.

Pros: up to 20 hard drives can be connected to this card using port multipliers, and the onboard RAID can handle all of the drives.

Cons: very minor con, i would have liked to have all the sata connectors facing the front of the case so that I would have better for air flow.

Overall Review: I used this with 4 addonnics port multiplier to get 20 drives of this card and the transfer speed is about 1.2 Gbps between the hard drives. I'm just guessing that 1 drive would get about 6 Gbps per channel, as advertised.