Rosewill RC-200 PCI IDE (ATA) Silicon Image RAID (0/1/0+1/JBOD) Host Controller Card

Pros: Simple-Proven 6-80 Chipset-Long Lasting

Cons: None

Overall Review: This is a real steal for a controller card that is unbeatable in many respects... Been using this card, and its Koutech cousin for years. My Server has one of these running and XP 1700 and 2 Samsungs in Raid 0+1...its that old. Paired with good 7200 hard drives, it will easily do 90 to 110 mbs/sec.

Pros: I've owned a nearly identical card based on the Sil0680 chipset for several years and it's been solid. I bought 2 of these recently so I can re-use 2 clients' existing IDE HDD & Optical drives with a new AM2 mobo that only had 1 IDE Interface. This allows me to attach the Optical drive to the IDE port on the mobo so I can boot from CD/DVD, and attach the HDD to the primary IDE port on this card. My clients get to save a few bucks by keeping HDD's & Optical drives, while still getting the upgraded power of a dual-core system. Works in most Linux distros, including Ubuntu, Puppy, PCLinuxOS, Knoppix, Dynebolic & Zenwalk.

Cons: Adds 2-3 seconds to boot time. I think this is because it has it's own BIOS and must enumerate attached devices before OS boot so that the OS can 'see' the devices attached.

Overall Review: I've been using this & similar cards based on the Silicon Image 0680 chipset for several years with great success. Note: 1.Optical drives will not boot from this card. 2.I was having "Delayed Write Errors" until I installed the latest driver. You can get the new driver for WinXP 32-bit from: http://rosewill.com/RosewillSoftware/SiI0680a_rdrv1017.zip -or- for WinVista 32-bit from: http://rosewill.com/RosewillSoftware/RC-200%20driver%20for%20Windows%20Vista%2032bit%20v1.0.rar The driver download page is confusing as it has some of the drivers mislabelled. That's why I linked to the correct driver above. For other Win versions pay particular attention to the column labelled "Description/Size" as some of the other columns seem to be mislabelled. 3.If installing Windows with primary boot drive attached to this card, you must press F6 at the prompt just after the Win install cd starts. Be sure to insert the floppy that came with the card prior to pressing F6, but after PC boots from CD.

Pros: Works great..... no problems at all.

Cons: None that I can think of.

Overall Review: I bought two of these cards for use in a freeNAS server (linux). FreeNAS sees all the drives and configures them fine. When used with a USB key you can have freeNAS spin the drives down and adjust the acoustics on the drives (if supported by the drive). This is a great power saving feature. Its a great way to use up those older PATA drives you have lying around :)

Pros: As advertised somewhat low profile works well

Cons: no fancy doodads a little extra work to install.

Overall Review: This device is clearly labelled a pci ide *HD* (as in, hard drive?) controller. So it's OBVIOUSLY not for optical drives. And the correct drivers /ARE/ included on the cd, you just need to put them on a floppy before you try to install windows via this card. -Overall this is an incredible card for the price. It works exactly as advertised, and I would certainly have paid more for it.

Pros: Very good price Super easy setup, no problems with BIOS settings, etc. Included drivers recognized by Windows XP Pro. Everything worked well, and boots off of RAID 0 setup. Included 2 cables, kit to convert to low-profile, and drivers in floppy and CD format. Good thinking on their part.

Cons: Would be nice if IDE ports were on top, facing vertical, not horizontal towards other expansion slots. I had to rearrange some cards so that this RAID card was the last in the expansion bays, so as to not interfere with other cards' space and cooling. 4 eggs for that, and other points mentioned in benchmark test below...

Overall Review: This is my first experience with a RAID setup. I wanted to learn how much of a performance increase a RAID 0 array would provide in comparison to a non-RAID setup. So I did some testing and benchmarking. I used the same exact computer for both tests, and the same exact HDD’s. PCMark04 was the Benchmark Software. Computer: Pentium 4 1.7GHz 512MB PC133 RAM Western Digital WD400 40GB Hard drives. Non-RAID (Single HDD): XP Startup - 6.7MB/s Application Loading - 4.9MB/s File Copying - 21.4MB/s General HDD Usage - 3.9MB/s RAID 0 Setup (2 HDD): XP Startup - 8.3MB/s Application Loading - 5.2MB/s File Copying - 29.5MB/s General HDD Usage - 4.7MB/s Each area showed an increase in performance, though not as much as I had expected. Overall increase of 17.38%. My conclusion? This card would be good for RAID 1, or simply adding Hard drives to a system. But, if your goal is performance and speed, I think you will need a b

Pros: Cost effective and gets the job done. Running a mirrored pair of Seagate 320gb 32mb drives in a nForce 2 chipset home built server.

Cons: I was a first timer to RAID and while I understand how the concept, the manual is a little skimpy and confusing. My biggest problem: I was getting a "incomplete raid setup" error at boot but never specified the problem. My problem was the mirror wasn't copied completely yet, just had to give it an hour or two to finish. Upon next reboot the error was gone.

Overall Review: Great price, even came with 2 ribbon cables.

Pros: Installation, once a hardware problem of my own making was out the way, was very easy. Instant drive recognition and operation after drivers installation. Just as fast ATA operation as on a discreet motherboard IDE port.

Cons: 1) Rosewill seems to be too cheap to hire a professional Chinese-English translator. The manual is hardcore Engrish. (Hey, I do speak a couple foreign languages, but I know my capabilities. These nutjobs translating for some manufacturer's manuals do NOT know their limitations.) Not only difficult to understand, the manual contradicts the CD label, which instructs to the user to install drivers before installing "the device." Wrong. Hardware is installed first, followed by Windows recognition of new hardware then pretty standard WinXP drivers installation. 2) IDE ports placement on the card makes it very difficult to route an IDE cable if your case has the PSU at the bottom, such as my Antec 900. (Superb case!) The IDE cables point back at the motherboard.

Overall Review: Maybe it's just in my head, but it seems the drive is now faster than it was on the motherboard's IDE port in the same system. At first I could not get Windows to boot at all. Time and again, the system would hang after just as it was starting to load Windows. I pulled the card and discovered two pins that were bent and in contact with each other. I pried the pins apart and the system booted into Windows. After that, drivers installation was pretty easy. This card would have received a solid five from me, except for the comical manual.

Pros: Low price Common chipset (Silicon Image 0680) Reasonable performance Right-Angle Pin Headers (if case is low profile) Drive Access LED Header Support from Silicon Image (newer drivers and chipset centric docs, it's a reference design)

Cons: Soldered-on EEPROM Setup Menu in line-text mode, crude but sufficient PCB coating matte finsh looks cheap Electrolytic capacitors instead of tantalum/other Right-Angle Pin Headers (cable can interfere with adjacent PCI cards under it). Poor documentation with card, is ok if you have used these as I have but will require a few minutes to learn RAID basics if not, otherwise nothing special about terms or use of this card over any other brand of soft-raid card.

Overall Review: Don't expect performance RAID0 w/ modern drives because it's on PCI bus. Performance is reasonable though, tiny bit lower than contemporary alternatives from Promise or Highpoint but at a fraction of the cost. Ideal to add 48bit LBA support to older m'board, add RAID1 redundancy for realtime data (drive failure) protection, or more easily allow migrating Win2k/XP install without repair install since drive controller remains same (presuming OS drive is connected to this). It's not ideal for running OS, but for testbed use, expedient. Raid Manager software is OK but seems buggy about reporting failure messages, didn't send email and I was too apathetic to keep trying to set it up. The ideal use for this card is to cheaply add PATA drives when you run out of controllers, but no ATAPI support unless the unlabeled jumper puts into non-RAID (UDMA) mode, but docs are poor. I own 4 similar cards w/SiI0680 (+ this) and it's as good as the others, just cheaper.