HighPoint RocketRAID 3520 SATA Raid Controller Author:  Jason Jacobs Date:  2008.01.28 Topic:  Storage Provider:  HighPoint Manufacturer:  HighPoint

Why RAID?

First off RAID stands for redundant array of independant disks, and the technology is present in most servers and many home users PC's. RAID technology has been around for many years and has been used with almost every type of hard drive made. This would include IDE, SATA, SCSI, and the new SAS types of drives. So why would a home user need RAID? Two easy words can explain, Performance and Protection.

RAID not only allows for the real time backup of data, known as fault tolerance, but can also significantly improve performance. How much you ask? We are talking double, triple, or more in terms of speed and data access. There are several types of RAID but the most common used are 0 and 1. RAID 0 is pure performance with no fault tolerance while RAID 1 is fault tolerance at the cost of a bit of performance, and yes you can combine the two into whats known as RAID 0+1. Now I know you're all interested in the performance aspect so let's talk about RAID 0 for a second. Here's a quick explanation:

Your hard drive is a collectionof files and folders. Think of it as if it were a giant book. When you double click on a file you have given a command to the hard drive to search for and open that file. Think of it as telling the librarian to open the book and find a single page. Lets say it takes the librarian 10 seconds to find that page you asked for. RAID 0 tears the book in two or more parts and has several people searching for the single page all at the same time. The work gets done quicker, much quicker. Theoretically the more hard drives you add to the RAID 0 the faster the performance, in reality you will reach a point of diminishing returns after too many hard drives. That point depends on the controller, the technology, and several other factors including sector size. Most common users won't go beyond 4 hard dirves in the typical array with the most common being two. In this review we took the HighPoint RocketRAID 3520 for a spin and outfit it with eight 500GB Maxtor SATA II Hard drives. Yes this is overkill, and we will get to some of the issues we encountered later, but for the number conscious this means we could have created a 4TB array. Thats a lot of storage space!

HighPoint RocketRAID 3520

At the high end of HighPoints SATA lineup of controller cards the 3520 has a grocery list of features and its specifications are as follows:

As you can see the 3520 is the big daddy of the group supporting a totoal of 8 drives and having 256MB of DDR-II ECC Ram onboard. Those familiar with the technology will notice the ECC ram instead of a normal buffer for extra protection when processing your data.

Specifications:

As we stated earlier the 3520 has a grocery list of advanced features and support that firmly places it at the high end of RAID controllers. The big change in the High Point controllers is the addition of a dedicated XOR processor in the 3000 series cards which means less CPU overhead and no cpu involvement during writing to the disk(s).

Now let's take a closer look at the controller and our test setup.