Hot Deal - RocketRAID 4320 for $329
by Gary Key on March 20, 2009 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Gary's First Looks
We receive a lot of press releases each day for various products from a wide variety of sources. We will start providing these on a more timely basis, but one press release this week really caught our eye. HighPoint Technologies recently sent us their RocketRAID 4320 for a full review and now through a partnership with NewEgg, the cost has been reduced to $329 for a limited time. So far our testing results are very positive and we should have a review available shortly. In the meantime, here is the official press release.
"HighPoint Technologies is partnering with NewEgg.com the nationwide #2 ranking e-commerce website to offer the RocketRAID 4320 – an 8 port SAS RAID Controller with the Intel IOP348 for $329. The RocketRAID 4320 with the Intel IOP348 at 1.2GHz is the industry fastest and most reliable I/O Engine in the SAS RAID controller industry.
By offering the RocketRAID 4320 at $329 on NewEgg.com customers benefit from a 100% Savings when compared to other manufactures of 8 port SAS RAID controllers with the Intel IOP348 which are priced at $625.
HighPoint has recognized that the struggling economy has forced many businesses into offer lower costing products to entice customer spending. Offering the RocketRAID 4320 at $329 benefits the customer as they will get the highest value for their purchase with the industry’s highest performing and most robust SAS Hardware RAID controller.
The RocketAID 4320 supports the fastest bus speeds with PCI-Express x8 and offers two internal mini-SAS cable connectors that are fast, secure and clutter free. Support for a battery back up unit (BBU) maximizes data protection without sacrificing performance.
SAS scalability fulfills the ever increasing need for adding more storage capacity. Scaling to higher capacities enable customers to pay only for storage they need. Scalability is ideal for file server and content intensive storage platforms requiring the best combination of cost and capacity storage solution.
Backward compatibility to SATA hard drives fulfills the need of storage hungry applications. The lower cost and higher capacity SATA drives are ideal for back up, archiving and storing detail media files.
The higher performing 15K RPM SAS hard drives offers the highest sustained transfer rates for performance hungry applications. Streaming I/O involves digital video and requires high sustained read and write throughput. The RocketRAID 4320 with 15K RPM SAS drives can achieve 1GB/s of sustained throughput for these streaming I/O environments.
Don’t miss out on the huge savings for your storage needs. Purchase the RocketRAID 4320 for $329 exclusively through NewEgg.com."
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Twoboxer - Saturday, March 21, 2009 - link
The "mark up", expressed as a percentage, must always be <= 100% because the formula is:Mark Up = Profit / Selling Price
So a markup of 50% means the item is selling for "two times cost".
There are lots of reasons for this convention, but who cares lol.
Glenn - Friday, March 20, 2009 - link
This is the only NewEgg review is from 10-8-2008 so it definately isn't new. I hope your experiences testing this are better Gary!10/8/2008 Tech Level: somewhat high - Ownership: 1 day to 1 week
This user purchased this item from Newegg
Pros: Semi-fast read/write transfer rates.
Cons: Long initialization to get into the controller's BIOS, so if you're looking for a fast boot, it's not going to happen with this controller; however, it's initialization is faster than the Adaptec 5405 controller by about 20 seconds. The set-up program is not user friendly; it's very inelegant and arcane compared to Adaptec's.
Other Thoughts: I was using this controller with (2) SAS Seagate Cheetah drives in a Vista 64-bit desktop system. It handled a Striped Array with no problems. However, the long controller BIOS initialization was a problem.
smith1795 - Thursday, June 4, 2009 - link
http://cheap-conveyancing-online.blogspot.com/smith1795 - Thursday, June 4, 2009 - link
http://cheap-conveyancing-online.blogspot.com/Zap - Sunday, March 22, 2009 - link
Don't all controllers that have to load their own BIOS add several seconds to the boot process?Etsp - Friday, March 20, 2009 - link
"Tech Level: somewhat high" This is an enterprise class card, it's not meant for Joe Schmoe "I can format windows" It really sounds like this guy simply bit off more than he could chew.davem2342 - Friday, March 20, 2009 - link
The long initialization time is purposely set in the firmware to compensate for drive spinup and detection, especially with drives connected through SAS expanders. I believe the max number of drives supported on this controller is 128. The controller BIOS spends a great deal of time at boot waiting for devices to init and be reported and then the BIOS must scan all devices for any existing RAID metadata.jkresh - Friday, March 20, 2009 - link
Garry,In your review are you comparing it with the 5805 and 1680 (both based on the same intel chip)? i am about to build a raid 5 setup (4 drives to start either seagate 1.5's or caviar blacks) and looking at these 3 cards. The highpoint is a lot cheaper (about $200 less then the adaptec (when you count the cost of minisas-sata cables) and $300 less then the areca). It looks like the areca beats the adaptec http://it.anandtech.com/IT/showdoc.aspx?i=3532">http://it.anandtech.com/IT/showdoc.aspx?i=3532 and is probably worht the $100 difference over it but if the highpoint is close its price is a lot better then the other 2.
Another question I have is on battery backup both the adpatec and areca have battery options but I didn't see anything about that in a quick check of newegg for this card. Does highpoint have a battery option?
Sunrise089 - Friday, March 20, 2009 - link
I'm sure it does something cool, but can someone explain what this enables versus motherboard-based RAID solutions?solicitorsuk - Saturday, September 26, 2009 - link
That’s special information. Thanks for giving out pleasant articlehttp://solicitorsuk.blogspot.com/">http://solicitorsuk.blogspot.com/