HighPoint RocketRAID 404
Reviewed by Akimoto
Provided by HighPoint Technologies

Impressions and Specifications

The card came packaged well; the box is quite large and well padded. Inside the box are three floppy disks (one with drivers and one with array management software for Windows), and four IDE cables, which allow for the buyer to fill the card up to full capacity right out of the box. The manual included is very thorough and provides in-depth troubleshooting tips.

The HPT404 supports up to 8 disks in the configurations of RAID 0, RAID 1, RAID 0+1, and JBOD. JBOD stands for Just a Bunch of Disks, and it merely compiles the selected disks into one continuous logical drive. It offers no performance benefits or data security, and if one drive fails then the entire array is lost. A very nice feature of the HPT404 is that there is no capacity limitation placed on the drives, which has been a flaw of some other RAID adapters. Unfortunately the card is rather large and may have trouble fitting into some rack mount servers. The many LED jumpers (enough for each channel) allow for the monitoring of separate drives on the array, and an onboard speaker beeps loudly during POST and will be sure to notify anyone in the immediate area of RAID problems. One downside is that the card will not run on a 66 MHz PCI bus, so real performance may vary depending on the PCI bus activity as well as drive use.