Final Thoughts & Conclusion

With ever-increasing computer usage in today's society, data is playing a bigger and bigger role in everyone's lives. From digital music, to gaming, to server speeds, performance and data integrity are important factors in computing. What would you do if your 80GB hard drive containing all your music and videos from iTunes crashed tomorrow? Would you pay thousands of dollars to have a company try recovering data from it? HighPoint's RocketRAID 3120 offers a better solution, supporting RAID 0 and 1. With RAID 1, you can use two identical disks to protect your data if one disk fails.

With RAID 0, the read and write speeds of your small business' server over the company network can be increased, improving overall productivity and profit. The RocketRAID 3120 makes a perfect addition to any small office or person server or workstation, supporting up to two SATA II drives.

As HighPoint's GPL-Licensed driver was recently integrated with Linux Kernel 2.6.25, installation in Linux is simple. All that is required is the building of a kernel module, taking little or no time to complete. Any distribution using the 2.6.25 kernel or later will support their RocketRAID 3120 RAID controller. However, installation of the WebGUI for easy configuration can be a little more complicated, as it is packaged as an RPM by default. Not all Linux distributions are RPM-friendly, leaving some work to be done, especially in the case of Gentoo.

However, it doesn't take a full-blown Linux Systems Administrator to figure out how to get the WebGUI working, and once it's up and running, usage couldn't be simpler.

In terms of performance, I'd hope that my benchmarks speak for themselves. The RocketRAID 3120's RAID 0 speeds blow single drive and RAID1 performance out of the water, nearly doubling both read and write speeds. Seek times are only decreased slightly, but it should provide a somewhat noticable different to experienced users. RAID 1 speeds aren't far behind those of a single drive, making a system running off a RAID1 array more than usable.

HighPoint has done the Linux community a giant deal of good with their GPL driver, but I'd like to see the WebGUI packaged in some form other than an RPM. Whether bysharing the source for installing, or creating a shell script that installs on any distribution. However, as I said, the usability of the WebGUI itself far overshadows the issues I came across during installation.

HighPoint has a fully Linux-compatible product on their hands with the RocketRAID 3120, and I hope they continue this trend with future products.

Pros

• Hardware RAID — low CPU utilization
• Driver built into Linux kernel
• WebGUI provided by HighPoint for easy configuration
• Fantastic performance in Linux
• 128MB of onboard DDR2 memory
• LED outputs for failure and usage
• Supports RAID 0, 1, and JBOD

Cons

• No external ports
• WebGUI packaged as an RPM, tricky to install
• Only supports two drives