what about highpoint 1640 SATA RAID controller ?

[Gary D. Margiotta]

On Tue, 29 Nov 2005, Toll, Eric wrote:

> 3Ware is my favorite, it has a true hardware based RAID.  I
> thought hipoint, promise etc just leach off of the cpu to do
> its job.   I paid just over $100.00 for a 2 port 64bit 3Ware
> card.  Recommend the WD Raid edition drives.  Alt+2 to setup
> the RAID array in the 3Ware bios page.  Group the drives..
> Boot FreeBSD and it sees the card without having to do
> anything.  Neeto GUI webserver to check array etc. It can
> also email you if the array gets into trouble..

It depends on what Highpoint controllers you are talking about.  There are 
"soft" versions from Promise and Highpoint, which leach off the CPU for a 
lot of their work.  This is the case with the 1640 controller I believe. 
However, at least with Highpoint, they do offer a series with a dedicated 
processor onboard, which is their "A" series, which is meant to compete 
with the offerings of 3Ware.

I recently purchased an 1820A series controller from Highpoint, which is 
an 8-port Serial ATA controller, 64-bit (32-bit PCI compatible), for just 
over $200 USD.  I paired it up with 4 WD 320GB drives, in a RAID-5 config, 
and it's a screamer.  The motherboard/CPU is a dual P-II 400 on an Asus 
board, and the speed is amazing out of an older machine such as this.  I 
know I wouldn't have the same speed on one of the "soft" controllers from 
either company.

I did exactly what you described, popped the card in, hooked up the 
drives, Ctrl-H to get into the BIOS, set up the RAID-5, popped in the 
5.4-RELEASE CD, and loaded it right up without having to jump through 
hoops:

FreeBSD 5.4-RELEASE #0: Wed Oct 12 23:29:12 EDT 2005
     root at daffy.spatzie.org:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/PORKY
Timecounter "i8254" frequency 1193182 Hz quality 0
CPU: Pentium II/Pentium II Xeon/Celeron (400.91-MHz 686-class CPU)
   Origin = "GenuineIntel"  Id = 0x651  Stepping = 1 
Features=0x183fbff<FPU,VME,DE,PSE,TSC,MSR,PAE,MCE,CX8,APIC,SEP,MTRR,PGE,MCA,CMOV,PAT,PSE36,MMX,FXSR>
real memory  = 268435456 (256 MB)
avail memory = 253050880 (241 MB)
MPTable: <OEM00000 PROD00000000>
FreeBSD/SMP: Multiprocessor System Detected: 2 CPUs
  cpu0 (BSP): APIC ID:  0
  cpu1 (AP): APIC ID:  1

hptmv0: <RocketRAID 182x SATA Controller> mem 0xd8000000-0xd807ffff irq 18 
at device 18.0 on pci0
RocketRAID 182x SATA Controller driver Version 1.1
RR182x [0,0]: channel started successfully
RR182x [0,1]: channel started successfully
RR182x [0,2]: channel started successfully
RR182x [0,3]: channel started successfully
RR182x: RAID5 write-back enabled

da0 at hptmv0 bus 0 target 0 lun 0
da0: <RR182x RAID 5 Array 3.00> Fixed Direct Access SCSI-0 device
da0: 915735MB (1875425280 512 byte sectors: 255H 63S/T 116739C)

I like the price point, the performance, and the ease of upgrade, I can 
pop this into a newer machine with a 64-bit slot and keep right on going. 
I never got the same warm and fuzzy from 3Ware, plus their cards are much 
more expensive, and I'm working on a lower budget.

I can't speak about any monitoring tools or management software, as I 
haven't looked into it, but for the way it is, it suits my needs just 
fine.

-Gary