Introduction

With the massive capacities today's hard drives offer brought together with the growing importance of data, data integrity and protection is more important than ever. The most common solution to protect data is through Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks (RAID). Various levels of RAID exist, but the most prominent two for the home and small office user are RAID0 and RAID1, one for speed and one for integrity.

HighPoint Technologies recently sent us the RocketRaid 3120 SATA RAID controller, which supports up to two SATA hard drives and JBOD or RAID levels 1 and 0. It comes in a low-profile PCI-Express x1 card, and features 128MB of DDR2 memory. With their GPL driver recently incorporated in to the Linux kernel, BIOSLEVEL looks at the RocketRAID 3120 and how well supported it is in Linux.

Packaging & Appearance

The RR3120 came to us in a white box, with items listed on the box. The front has a picture of the card itself, as well as a short description and five of the card's features.

The back of the box lists all the features of the card. Not many packages list this many features.

A cardboard box inside of the white box holds the card, manual, SATA cables, and driver CD. The card is wrapped in an anti-static bag and everything is protected by two pieces of foam fitted for the box.

The card itself can be installed as either full-profile or low-profile. HighPoint includes a PCI bracket for either method. I'll be using a full-sized case, so I have no need for the low-profile bracket.

There's no heatsink on this card, and I don't imagine the card will heat up that much. Running only 128MB of onboard memory and two SATA channels shouldn't generate that much heat.