Features & Specifications

HighPoint is dedicated to their RocketRAID cards, and that dedication pays off in both performance and data integrity thanks to the massive set of features and specifications the cards have. Despite the RocketRaid 3120 only supporting RAID 0 and 1, it is still feature-rich.

Advance RAID Features

• Support RAID 0, 1 and JBOD
• Multiple Logical Drive Support
• Online array roaming
• Online capacity expansion (OCE) and Online RAID level migration (ORLM)
• Quick and Background initialization for instant RAID configuration
• Automatic drive insertion / removal detection and rebuild
• 64bit LBA support greater than 2TB per volume
• S.M.A.R.T monitoring hard drive status for reliability
• VSS (Variable Sector Size) for over 2TB single volume in 32bit LBA OS
• MAID (Massive Array of Idle Disks)
• Array Monitors, Alerts and Indicators
• Active/Failed LED
• SMTP for email notification
• SAF-TE (I2C) enclosure management
• Alarm/ Buzzer alerts for array activity

The card itself, both through hardware and software, is able to expand and repair RAID arrays on-the-fly, monitor disks, send e-mail notifications about alerts and failures, and even features buzzer alarms. It can support up to dual 2TB hard drives, and supports AHCI hotswapping as well.

RAID Management

• TerabyteGuard™ for Reliability
• Firmware update in the Operating System
• Hot key (ctrl-h) boot-up RAID manager via BIOS
• API library for customizing AP
• Command Line Interface (CLI)
• Web browser-base RAID management software
• Disk scrubbing to prevent degraded RAID arrays
• Bad sector repair and remapping to reduce dropped drives
• ATA pass-through mode support

The card can be configured during the system's boot process, or through HighPoint's GUI or WebGUI software, that I'll look at later in this review. The RocketRAID 3120 also supports a few customizations through an API, as well as disk and array repair tools.

Operating System Support

• Windows (2000, XP, x64, Vista (32 and 64 Bit))
• Linux (GPL Licensed Linux Open Source Driver into Linux Kernel 2.6.25)
• Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) and 10.5 (Leopard)
• FreeBSD

As I mentioned earlier, the GPL Licensed driver was only recently integrated with the Linux kernel. It just so happens that 2.6.25 is the kernel that Gentoo Linux 2008.0 is built upon. For our benchmarks and the remainder of the review, I'll be utilizing Gentoo Linux 2008.0.

Host Adapter Architecture

• Hardware RAID IOP
• PCI -Express x1 (x4, x8 and x16 slot compatible)
• 128 MB of DDR II memory
• Write through and write back cache
• 2 SATA II channels at 3Gb/s per port
• Support up to 2 SATA Hard Drives
• BIOS booting support
• BIOS PnP and BBS (BIOS boot specification) support
• RoHS compliant

As with most PCI-Express peripherals, the RR3120 can fit in any PCI-Express slot that is it's own size or larger. In this case, the RR3120 is an x1 slot, so it'll fit in any PCI-Express slot. Luckily, my motherboard just so happens to have a PCI-Express x1 slot. Also, the RocketRAID 3120 features 128MB of DDR II memory, whereas many two-channel cards don't feature onboard memory of any sort. Hopefully this will bolster performance.

Let's look at my system's setup before moving to installation.