scsi

Adaptec is reselling the Highpoint RocketRAID 100 as their own product. This is not a hardware RAID implementation, but the BIOS on the card support booting from the RAID array, which would otherwise be impossible using RAID0. The chip used (HPT370A) is nothing but a ATA100 controller, and can be used as such.

All the magic is in the drivers. Adaptec only supports Windows OSes, but it actually works out of the box for FreeBSD, and Linux supports the chipset as well. I'm running a RAID1 configuration for a file server, using matched HDs. Read performance is noticably faster, and write performance does not seem to have suffered much.

One issue: when one drive fails the RAID1 keeps on running, but rebooting requires manual intervention at the console until the drive is replaced and the mirror rebuilt.
It's not an issue for me, but continuing the boot after a timeout would have been nice.

I have a Compaq NT4 Server I have tried for two days to install this card. It does not work. NT4 does not recognise the driver on a fresh NT install. Worse still when I plugged hard drives into the card the my origonal raid array (which is rock solid) wasn't reconised as the boot device. Do yourself a favour spend a little extra cash and buy a card that works!

This is a good solution for the home user who is looking for either faster transfers from his hard drives (RAID 0) or to secure his data (RAID 1). I use it on my Windows XP system and never had any problems. It's easy to install and configure. Windows XP supports it natively, but you should get the latest drivers and BIOS to support drives larger than 137GB.

The down sides, in my opinion:
. Doesn't offer RAID 3 (parity: 3 drives give you the capacity of 2 with the benefits of RAID 1) or RAID 5.
. In RAID 1 mode, it only supports 2 drives, even if you have 4. You cannot, for example, mirror a set of 200 GB + 60 GB drives to form a mirrored 260GB drive.
. No drivers offered for Linux.

It is a good idea to read more about the different types of RAID before purchasing your RAID adapter.

For about the same price, the Promise FastTrak SX4000 offers a much better product that supports RAID 5 and up to 256MB of on-board cache memory.