Almost all new motherboards are now available with onboard RAID at least as an option. In particular RAID 0 (striping) looks attractive for many users, because it offers increased performance. RAID 0 is merging the capacity of at least 2 hard-disks and increases performance by distributing data over all involved drives, so that they can be read in parallel and because of this, faster. Highpoint has recently released a new family of ATA 133 RAID controllers: a 2-channel version (HPT 372) known as the "Rocket RAID 133" and a 4-channel version (HPT 374) sells under the name "Rocket 404". Both controllers are also available as on-board chips. The ABIT KR7A for example is sporting the 2-channel HPT 372 controller. Neither ATA 133 disks nor ATA 133 RAID controllers are more expensive than their ATA 100 predecessors, but are they better, which means, faster? Is it worthwhile to update to ATA 133, when ATA 100 is still quite a new standard and somewhere in the not so far future the current IDE standard (parallel ATA) will be replaced by serial ATA? In addition to these points we also wonder what software RAID 0 using the Dynamic Disk feature of Windows 2000 and Windows XP Professional has to offer. This is the cheapest way to run RAID 0 and we therefore included striping with Dynamic Disk in our comparison.

In total we tested the following configurations:

ATA 133 has so far received good reviews - for example here - and we were keen to see how the combination of the Highpoint ATA 133 RAID controllers and these drives works out.

Rocket 404 ATA 133 RAID controller (HPT 374):
The Rocket 404 is probably the most interesting product in this comparison. One main feature of the Rocket 404 is of course ATA 133, but before we come to this in more detail, we will have a look at the other main feature: it has 4 channels. Why would somebody want a 4-channel RAID controller? There could be several reasons for this:

Storage: The Rocket 404 allows connecting 8 disks. The RAID function JBOD combines the connected disks to one huge drive.

Speed: RAID 0 with 4 disks is (at least in theory) faster than RAID 0 with 2 disks, because the data are not read/written in parallel (as with 2 disks) but from 4 disks at the same time, and by this further increasing the transfer speed. Although a 2-channel controller allows also running RAID 0 with 4 disks (2 master + 2 slaves), it is not recommended to do so, because the involvement of slaves in a RAID 0 array slows down the transfers considerably.

Data protection: A 4-channel controller with 4 disks allows running RAID 1+0, means striping and mirroring. As 2 disks are used for striping and 2 disks for mirroring, such an array is as fast as a standard RAID 0 array with 2 disks and offers still data protection by mirroring.

Flexibility: A 4-channel controllers offers many possibilities to arrange the connected hard disks: up to 4 independent RAID 0 arrays (with 2 disk each) can be set up, or combinations of RAID 0 arrays with single hard disks, for example 1 RAID 0 array with 2 disks plus 6 independent IDE drives running in single IDE mode.

The HPT 374 comes in a big box with 4 attached IDE cables, several floppies disks with drivers, a BIOS utility, and the RAID management utility. The PCI card itself comprises 2 RAID controllers and after installation the Win XP device manger is indeed showing 2 RAID devices. As already mentioned the HTP 374 allows 8 HDD's and offers RAID 0, RAID 0+1, RAID 1, and JBOD. The 8 drives can be also run as single disks: the HPT374 functions then as simply an Ultra ATA 133 interface. The HPT 374 has a unique market position because at the time of this review it was the only 4-channel RAID controller with ATA 133 support. On top of the ATA 133 support the HPT 374 offers additional interesting features in comparison to the 4-channel RAID from Promise, the FastTrak TX/4, which we used as the ATA 100 counterpart in our comparison, such as e-mail failure notification and a failure alarm.

Rocket 404 - click to enlarge

FastTrak TX/4 - click to enlarge

Although the TX/4 has also 4 channels, it doesn’t allow connecting more than 4 disks because a master+slave set up is not possible - only one drive per connector is allowed. In addition we found that the “RAID Management Software" from Highpoint allows you to set up a RAID array from within Windows, which is handy and also not possible with the TX/4. A direct comparison shows that the HPT374 is much ahead of the TX/4 in terms of features. The only advantage the TX/4 has over the HPT 374 is the support of a 66Mhz PCI bus, which however is useless for the usual non-server board user. Although the HPT 374 is brand new Highpoint has already released 2 BIOS and driver revision. The TX/4 is not even listed in the Promise support site, after more than a year in the market.  It is strange therefore that Promise is asking for a 30% higher price for their TX/4 than Highpoint is for the Rocket 404.

Highpoint Raid Management Utility

Promise Fastcheck Monitoring Utility

The installation of the Rocket 404 was as easy as it could be. After the card was recognized, we accessed the controller BIOS, arranged a bootable RAID 0 array, and installed Windows XP on the array, carefully observing to load the RAID drivers from the attached floppy disk during the installation process.

NEXT PAGE - The drives, testbed and tests..