Anyone using the Highpoint RocketRAID 2640x4?

Hi folks,

I finally put my Sawtooth G4 out to pasture for use as my office machine and bought a 2.8GHz 8 core machine (wooey!). I'm doing my first HD project and looking into setting up an internal Raid.

The CalDigit Raid card looks sexy, but I'm trying to stay under budget and looking at the Highpoint RocketRAID 2640x4.

Anyone have experience they can share about it?

Thanks,

Russ

I am using this card. Wanted the CalDigit but this one was $170, around $400 less. It does not have any connections for external drives, just the 4 internal. Had it about 3 weeks and so far no problems. The install requires purchasing a cable to bridge the 2640 to the multilane cable that connects the Mac's internal bays to the motherboard.

I got the cable here:

[www.maxupgrades.com]


The only difficult part of the install is that you must remove the main fan assembly and then disconnect the multilane cable from the motherboard. This is the cable that connects the 4 internal drive bays to the motherboard. Removing the cable proved difficult and you could easily damage the board if you were not careful.

You lose about 1/3rd of your drive space to RAID overhead if you do RAID 5. So I put 4 750gig drives in and after building the RAID, I have 2tb of available space.

Sprocketz,

Thanks much for the reply and information. I'm probably going with a plan similar to yours.

Did you move your system drive to the empty optical drive bay? If so, did you use the MaxUpgrades kit?

Best of luck,

-Russ

Yep Russ, that is exactly what I did. Bought the MaxUpgrades kit for two drives in the bottom optical bay although I only moved the one system drive into the space. Shane Ross mentioned a less expensive way of doing this but I have to say the the MaxUpgrades kit is a nice quality aluminum carriage that replaces the stock framework for the entire optical bay.

If you do this, be prepared to take some time doing it and go slow as MaxUpgrade's documentation is somewhat confusing. I called them to get help and the person I talked to was very helpful, although his English was a little hard to understand. He acknowledged the documentation problems saying the creation of documentation was almost harder than creating the product. I think this is kind of a one guy shop. But the products seem high quality.

When the install is finished you may have to futz with the position of the optical drive since it likely will not line up perfectly with the exterior door and may have trouble sliding open. It took me a few times pulling the new carriage out and playing with the optical drive to get it lined up right. You should also keep the original carriage and any other parts you remove in case you need to take the computer in for warranty work as I wouldn't put it past Apple to try to use this mod to void the warranty.

Let me reiterate being careful if you do choose to install the 2640. When you remove the fan assembly it may be sticky the first time. There are two screws that hold it into place. Make sure to pull the screw near the CPU heat sinks all the way out so that you don't confuse the stickiness of the fan carriage slide with the screw perhaps still partly in. The fan will take a strong pull the first time but after that is easy. Also, the multilane cable connection on the motherboard is a tough mother to disconnect and there are fragile components around it. Use a very small flat head screw driver to help lift the metal retaining clip on the connection and go very easy.

Sprocketz,

Thanks, once again, for the great information. You're 4-perf, all the way.

-Russ

Just FYI, any 2000 series Highpoint cards are SOFTWARE RAID, no dedicated cache or CPU, so that's why that card is less money.

You do ultimately get what you pay for.

At 500MB/sec it clocks considerably higher than the Apple card for a quarter of the price. It's a great piece of hardware.

I'd go with the CalDigit RAID card for three reasons:

HARDWARE
HARDWARE
HARDWARE

Jack Lindauer

There's one thing Jack forgot to mention:

HARDWARE

'Nuff said

When life gives you dilemmas...make dilemmanade.

I'm thinking of buying the Rocketraid, because it is faster then the Caldigit...
Can someone explain why exactly it is not as good as the Caldigit one?
It does go faster....???

Tony,

The Highpoint card in question initially was a 2000 series card. Those cards are software RAID cards, which means that they TAX your host machines CPU for their processing power. Your host machines CPU needs to run your OS & applications, not your RAID storage. In testing software RAID cards running a competitors 4 bay external box used as much as 30% of the host machines CPU while IDLE, not doing anything.....This reason in itself is a good reason to at least consider a Hardware RAID card, such as the CalDigit RAID card. I don't know what the current speeds of the Highpoint card are, but I do know ours are quite good with 4 drives in RAID 5 at 245MB/s READ & 247MB/s Write

[www.caldigit.com]

There are good reasons for choosing a hardware raid over software, but this Highpoint card seems to be doing well.

I have been running it for a couple months now.
I may go with the CalDigit card later, but for now this has been working fine and I have an additional NAS drive for backing up critical files. It's just a small 500gig drive and is not used for media which can be recaptured if needed.

I had a problem one time when our IT guys did some networking changes on the computer which of course destabilized the entire system for a few days. So it can be a problem.

Regarding CPU overhead, I am not seeing any significant CPU use with Activity Monitor on this 8 core Mac. All the CPU's just barely bump at the very bottom of the CPU activity display while the computer is just basically idling. That's just to reply to your comment regarding 30% CPU use in idle. I have not looked at the overhead numbers when media is being played off the raid.

I am thinking that before buying the more expensive CalDigit card, it would make more sense to invest in a Drobo which could then be used to backup all 4 computers in this edit bay, use the Highpoint card backed up by the Drobo for now and go with the CalDigit card later as funds provide.

Sproketz,

Just to reiterate what I said, so it's not taken out of context, "In testing software RAID cards running a competitors 4 bay external box used as much as 30% of the host machines CPU while IDLE, not doing anything". I didn't particularly reference any one companies product. All I wanted to do really was to illustrate our strengths with our card.

Thanks for considering our card in your future purchases.