Highpoint RocketRAID 2320 first impressions
2008-05-31 07:29 PM | 9 comments
In an effort towards achieving additional data security and fault tolerance, I recently purchased a Highpoint RocketRAID 2320 PCI Express card for my media server. The card supports up to 8 Serial ATA drives in various RAID levels. It's an x4 card electrically, but fits into a PCI Express x4, x8 or x16 slot.
While Intel's onboard RAID is commonplace on most new motherboards, it does not support online capacity expansion: the original size of the array is its maximum possible size. Any additional hard drives installed in the future would have to be split into a second disk set. One of the reasons I chose the RocketRAID was its expansion and migration features. Not only can you add disks at a later date, you can also change RAID levels and move the array to larger drives. As 1TB+ drives become cheaper in the future, the entire disk set can be replaced and expanded without losing its contents.
The card comes with 8 large Serial ATA cables, which fit all the way to the top of a standard server tower case without stretching. Installation was reasonably simple, and the built-in management software allows all operations to be performed from within inside the operating system.
Initial results with the card have been very positive. I created a RAID-5 array of three 500GB Seagate drives, which took slightly over two and a half hours to initialize. File copy speed from a standalone 500GB drive to the newly created array was 34MB/s, which I expect will increase as more disks are added. Windows shows the capacity as 931GB when formatted. CPU usage was under 10% during this operation, as well.
Two extra features that I'm really impressed with include the web-based management interface as well as the email alert capability. The system can be managed with a username and password from any networked computer, and the management utility sends out an email if a problem occurs with the array.
I'd highly suggest one of these cards if you're interested in a more advanced level of data storage. Already, things have just worked as expected and it's living up to the excellent reviews online.
Comments
Great notes on using he rocketraid 2230. I am about to buy one my self. I am considering using it with five 1tb wd disks in a raid5 array. I have one question for you. My plan is to creat one raid set with five 1tb wd disks and create two volum sets in the 4tb array with 2tb each, is that possible ? does the controller support multiple volum sets ? this way I can get araund the 2tb partition limit in xp 32bit an have two partitions with 2tb each and still running a raid5 array with more than 2tb total.
-Bjarte Kristiansen-
From Norway
Unfortunately I don't think what you want to do is possible. You can definitely have multiple RAID arrays attached to the controller (so if you had six 1TB disks, you could do two RAID5 arrays with three disks each, and each volume size would be < 2GB) but as soon as you establish a RAID set, it appears as a single volume in Disk Management. There *may* be something you can do with dynamic volumes in the Disk Management console, but I've always avoided those kind of tricks.
The easiest way for me to avoid the 2TB limit was to restart everything with a GPT-formatted volume and Vista. Windows Server 2003 will also support GPT disks for data (not for booting though.)
I will go for the six disk solution with two arrays. I gues my other computers running XP wil have a problem reading the GPT formated volume.
Thanks for your quick and helpfull answer.
It's called variable sector size, and if I remember correctly, that setting can ONLY be set in Web RAID management console, and ofcourse requires complete initiation afterwards... but currently I can't get WEB raid to work, which I always have used without problems (locally), but the management console, which I never have used, works fine ? Oh well, i'm prb. just tired, and it have been 3/4 of a year since I have made any modifications ;-)
So in conclusion, my 1,5tb array of 4x 500gb discs works fine, and the larger 4,5tb is just shown as unknown disc, so i'm pretty sure i just have to get web raid management console to work, and set a larger sector size. I havent made any physical changes, and bios utility shows all 8 discs as running fine.
And yes, you HAVE to update both firmware and driver to the latest, firmware v1.7 introduces variable sector size, the newest is 1.8.
I’m looking into making a server with 4×1.5TB in raid5 on the raidcontroller you are using.
A friend of my also has a raid5 with 4×1.5TB with his onboard raidcontroller. But his writespeeds suck pretty hard. His read is very nice, about 500MB/s, but his write is like 50MB/s.
Now I was wondering what your writespeed is of the raidvolumes since you have the non-onboard raidcontroller in use?
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The capacity migration shows up as another branch of the original array until completed. The process is fairly slow - it effectively involves a full format of the new drive, then striping the parity information to the new disk.
Initially the process was quoted to take almost eleven hours; I started the migration at 11:21AM and received the "expansion complete" notification at 10:55PM. During this time, though, the array was fully accessible and the priority of the process may have been changed.
Here's how the management utility appears with the new disk added:
The disk in My Computer: