HighPoint Rocket RAID 2314 PCI-E (x4) 4 Port eSATA RAID Controller

HighPoint Technologies Inc. is shipping the RocketRAID 2314 external four lane PCI-Express SATA II RAID Controller . The four ports provided by the RocketRAID 2314 SATA host adapter can support external SATA direct connect or SATA port multiplier enclosures.

Apple Mac Pro users can utilize Disk Utility to create striped RAID sets or utilize the HighPoint web based RAID management software to create RAID 0, 1, 5, 10, 50 and JBOD configurations with the RocketRAID 2314. The purpose of this review is to determine how the HighPoint RocketRAID 2314 will perform with an Apple Mac Pro.

Initially SATA was designed as an internal or inside-the-box interface technology, bringing improved performance and new features to internal PC or consumer storage. Creative designers quickly realized the innovative interface could reliably be expanded outside the PC, bringing the same performance and features to external storage needs instead of relying on USB or 1394 interfaces.

Controller Specifications

• PCI-e x4 (x8 and x16) slot compatible
• 4 External eSATA II ports at 3Gb/s per port
• Up to 4 SATA II Hard Drives
• Support RAID 0, 1, 5, 10, and JBOD
  
• Dynamic Sector Repair and Remapping
  
• Native Command Queuing (NCQ) for improved random performance
  
• Online Capacity Expansion (OCE) and Online RAID Level Migration (ORLM)
  
• Staggered drive spin up
  
• Write through and write back cache for RAID arrays
  
• BIOS Booting (INT13) to RAID array
  
• Quick and Background initialization for instant RAID access
  
• Hot swap and hot spare
  
• Online array roaming
  
• Automatic detect drive to rebuild degraded RAID
  
• S.M.A.R.T array monitoring for hard drive status and reliability
  
• 64bit LBA for RAID arrays greater than 2TB
  
• Web browser-base software (Web GUI)
  
• Command Line Interface (CLI)
  
• SMTP email notification for events and error reporting
  
• Remote array management through (Web GUI, RAID GUI and CLI)
  
• RoHS Compliant