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HighPoint Technologies e.SATA RAID Kit v2 |
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Installation and Usage
INSTALLATION AND USAGE
The installation of the e.SATA RAID kit is easy and should not take more than 30 minutes even for less experienced PC users. It is carried out in 2 steps: The RR1542 is plugged into a free PCI slot, followed by installing the RAID drivers and Highpoint’s RAID management software. Because the RR1542 is a 4-channel RAID controller, Windows “Device Manager” is seeing 2 physical RAID controllers with 2 channels each. Accordingly, the drivers have to be installed twice - once for each controller.
The RR1542 can be used without the RM1200 disk enclosure. In this case the RR1542 is working as a 2-channel SATA RAID controller, because only the 2 internal SATA channels can be used. If the RR1542 is to be used as a 4-channel RAID controller, or if additional storage is required, the RM1200 external enclosure with 2 additional disks has to join the game. To make the RM1200 operational the hard disks have to be very carefully pushed into the connector at the end of their respective trays. We initially mishandled this: 2 disk connector pins were not fully inserted in the tray. Consequently the disk was not recognized. It took us hours to find out what was wrong. The hard disks are then connected to the power supply with the Molex connector and fixed with screws into the tray. The trays holding the disks are then pushed into the RM1200 housing until they make contact with their respective PATA to SATA adaptors at the rear end of the housing. By locking the bays with a key the power to the disk in the respective tray is switched on. When the tray key is turned the disk powers up indicated by a green LED on the front panel, provided of course that the RocketMate 1200 enclosure itself was already connected to the 12 volt power DC outlet that comes with the kit.
The front end of the Rocket Mate is perforated. With the fan sitting at the other end and sucking air out, a strong airflow is running through the casing. We found that the Rocket Mate 1200 is definitely keeping the mounted disks cool, even when running them as RAID 0 array under full load for several hours. The fan is rather strong and quite “audible”. But better a noisy fan than overheating hard disks. Finally, the disks in the RM1200 bays are connected to the RocketRAID 1542 e.SATA outlets via a propriety e.SATA cable that comes with the RAID kit. The RocketMate 1200 is very robust device, well designed and manufactured, and definitely capable of protecting the disks when the enclosure is stored or transported away from the PC.
The e.SATA RAID kit v2 allows running the following RAID configurations:- RAID 0 requiring a minimum of 2 hard disks
- RAID 1 requiring 2 hard disks, no more than 2 drives can be used
- RAID 0+1 requiring 4 hard disks, no more than 4 drives can be used
- RAID 10 requiring 4 hard disks, no more than 4 drives can be used
- RAID 5 requiring a minimum of 3 hard disks
- JBOD arrays requiring a minimum of 2 hard disks
A good description how the various RAID levels are working and their respective advantages and disadvantages can be found here. In addition to the above mentioned RAID levels, various RAID + single disk combinations are possible. For example: RAID 0 with 3 disks + 1 single disk, or 2 independent RAID 0 arrays with 2 disks each.
As a basic function, the e.SATA RAID kit lets the user run the 2 internal SATA and the 2 external PATA disks independently from each other as single disks or combined as JBOD (“Just a Bunch Of Disks”) array. This configuration will be preferred by users looking for additional storage only. That’s not a too unlikely scenario as more and more mainboards are coming with SATA instead of PATA channels, and SATA disks can only run “alone” on a controller. To slave a second hard disk is not possible with SATA disks. This is cutting the number of previously possible harddisks with the usual 2 mainboard IDE PATA connector by half. Each of the up to 4 harddisks that can be connected to the RR1542 is using an independent IDE channel and it’s possible to install and boot the OS from any of them. The possibility to detach the external RM1200 and lock it away is another aspect which might be useful in certain situations when the e.SATA RAID Kit is used as external back-up.
Many users however will use the e.SATA RAID kit to run a RAID 0x4 array to speed up application performance or RAID 0+1, RAID 5, or RAID 10 arrays for a combination of increased levels of performance and data safety. As shown in our Rocket 404 test report here, a RAID 0x4 array when running from a 4-channel RAID card such as the RR1542 is better performing than RAID 0x2. The real world performance gain however is very small and comes with an increased risk to lose the data on the array. If only one of the 4 disks fails, all data on the array is lost. More interesting therefore is the capability of a 4-channel RAID controller to combine 4 disks for RAID 0+1. Such an array combines the speed advantage of RAID 0 through data striping with the increased data safety of RAID 1 through data mirroring. RAID 0+1 requires 4 physical hard disks. This is not possible with a 2-channel SATA controller because each channel can only accommodate 1 SATA disk. With more than 2 disks it is possible to run RAID 0+1, RAID 5, or RAID 10. All of them offer basically the same performance gain as RAID 0 with 2 disks, but offer in addition varying levels of fault tolerance. The possibility to run RAID levels requiring more than 2 disks is therefore one major advantage of the 4-channel RR1542 + RM1200 combo versus the usual onboard or PCI based 2-channel SATA RAID solutions. Another major advantage is the fact that the e.SATA kit allows to combine PATA and SATA disks. Most users are currently still using PATA disks, although nowadays many desktop PC users have 1 or 2 SATA disks. Highpoint's e.SATA RAID kit allows them to make the best out of this situation by combining PATA and SATA disks to more powerful RAID solutions than possible with a 2 SATA or 2 PATA disk only RAID array.
We mentioned already that Highpoint is offering 2 BIOS types for the RR1542: several “standard” BIOS versions and “RAID 5 capable” versions. If the RR 1542 is flashed with “RAID 5 capable” BIOS it supports RAID 0, 1, 10, 5, JBOD. When a “standard BIOS” is used, it supports RAID 0, 1, 0/1, JBOD. The RAID 5 BIOS revisions cannot create RAID 0/1 arrays. They will however continue to support 0/1 arrays that were created previously with the standard BIOS revisions. We were trying out the different versions of both BIOS types and did not realize that after a wile we had ended up with a RAID 5 BIOS version and a standard driver combination. Not only were the advertised BIOS levels not available but Windows booting was extremely slow. The user should therefore carefully check that the proper, BIOS matching driver is loaded.
  
The selection of the boot disk as well as the various RAID levels are arranged either through the RocketRAID 1542 BIOS which is accessible during system booting or later through the Windows based Highpoint “RAID Management” utility. With the 4 disks in our test we tried and could successfully set up RAID 0, 1/0, and 5 arrays without any problem. A very minor shortcoming for the RAID aficionado will be the fact that the RR1542 BIOS is not offering 4K and 8K RAID array block sizes. The selection ranges from 16K to 2048K. That is of course covering almost all needs. But RAID enthusiasts optimizing their RAID 0 arrays for maximum transfer rates often find that 4K or 8K are resulting in better sequential transfer rates, for what it is worth. The Intel ICH5-R is offering RAID block sizes ranging from 4K to 128 K.
 
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