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.
{ 9 } Comments
For reference, I added a fourth Seagate 500GB SATA2 drive to the array today, bringing the total storage space in the pool to 1.5TB. The process was fairly easy to complete: in the management console, selecting the existing array and clicking the OCE/ORLM (Online Capacity Expansion/Online RAID Level Migration) button prompted me to create a new RAID5 set. I accepted the default options and added the four connected drives.
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:
Hi,
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
Hi Bjarte,
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.)
Thanks Jake,
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.
I know this thread is old, but hit it when I had to recover an old windows image, and thereby also install drivers to my 2320 controller, and couldnt remember what the function that makes it possible to go above 2tb… I started with 8x 500 gb discs, and are currently running 2 arrays with 4×1,5tb and 4×500gb… and within a couple of weeks i buy 2x 1,5tb more and prb. just use the last 2 slots for a 1tb raid0 array for short term storage.
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 guess I was just impatient, because now the 4,5tb array is fully functional
I still can’t use web raid management console, but can do pretty much anything else than change sector size from management console.
hi,
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?
Write speed is going to suffer under any CPU-based RAID5 array. The RocketRaid 2320 offloads all operations to the CPU, similar to an onboard controller – the benefits over the stock Intel controller are easy expandability and ability to increase array size by swapping out drives at a later date, without data loss. My write speeds on an 8×500GB array are typically between 75MB/s and 35MB/s depending on the file and how full the array is. I should be able to provide a CrystalMark benchmark within a day or two though.
thank you very much for your information!
{ 2 } Trackbacks
[...] scenario: I now have seven active Seagate Barracuda SATA2 500GB drives in a RAID5 array, using a Highpoint RocketRAID 2320 card. This setup gives a total capacity of 3TB and can survive one drive completely [...]
[...] backup techniques that reduce the space required for full system backups. Short of installing a RAID array in my personal machine, I feel that this is the easiest and most secure way of creating full [...]
Post a Comment