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HighPoint RocketRAID 2640X4
Testing and Benchmarks (continued)
SiSoft Sandra Disk Performance Test
In this test, on the vertical scale, lower scores are best; on the horizontal scale higher scores are the best. Notice that the array in question is the red marker, the farthest right and the lowest vertically: the best darned array in the whole competition by a long shot again! With a sustained transfer rate of about 236 MB/sec this card is kicking ass and taking names. The RAID 5 configuration was performing around 190MB/sec. This RAID 0 has put some more spunk in this already awesome rig.
SiSoft Sandra Disk Read Test
This test records the read speed over the entire length of the drive. Obviously, higher is better and once again my array is the red marker. Again, the RAID 0 configuration pushes the curve up just a little bit more.
Conclusions
A few closing comments that I feel I need to make. The BIOS based configuration utility is a bit sparse in explanation. I found, during my setup phase, that to utilize a single drive, you were required to setup JBOD, which stands for Just a Bunch Of Disks, basically a non-RAID array (with only one disk in this case). Other controllers that I have used before tend to default to using the drives even if they are not configured into an array. Other than this one stepping point, I found the performance of the utility quite was sufficient and I am now the happy owner of a super speedy RAID5 array.
(July 02 2008) Addition by the author:
I would like to modify my previous position on the BIOS utility and also my comments regarding JBOD. I should have made it clear that JBOD is standard industry technology and setting up JBOD is a very routine and standard practice. Upon closer reading of all of the accompanying documentation of this product, I found that the BIOS utility is quite well documented and simply misread the section regarding JBOD configuration. The main point of my commentary was that some controllers, when a new drive is detected either automatically configure JBOD for you, or drop into the BIOS utility. Thanks to the people at HighPoint for point out my error.
With an average selling price of $149, the HighPoint RocketRAID 2640X4 PCI-Express x4 SAS RAID controller appears to be a complete steal. The performance that I saw in my testing leads me to change my decision about this card: I consider this a mid to high range card now instead of, as previously stated, a low end card. 300MB/sec is nothing to scoff at, especially when that is a 4 disk RAID array. I also really appreciate that the manufacturer provided testing data that was accurate and showed the drive performing quite well. It is easy to say from where I stand, this is by far one of the best mid range SAS RAID cards that I have ever laid my hands on.
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