HighPoint RocketRAID 1820A

Advantages: Fast, quiet, great RAID 0 performance
Disadvantages: 1 year warranty

...I received two of these (60Gb) as replacements for my previous disk (DiamondMax D740X 60Gb, which I also review here on Ciao) which were faulty. I didn't really get off to a good start, as one as of the disks was dead on arrival. It failed to be recognised by the BIOS on any of my machines, and the only controller which so much as acknowledged the drive's presence was my HighPoint 374. It appeared as a 'Maxtor CALYPSO' (the drive's codename), and the controller failed to boot. This indicated an electronics problem and duly, I returned it. On receiving my replacement drive, I striped it together as RAID 0 with the other one and crossed my fingers. From here on out it was nothing but good news! The drives are both exceptionally quiet - Maxtor has replaced the old ball-bearing motors with FDB (Fluid Dynamic Bearing) ones, which... Read review

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Advantages: Fast seek times
Disadvantages: Poor RAID 0 performance, highly unreliable, noisy

...I bought two of these drives to stripe together as a fast RAID 0 system disk. One was not running within specification on arrival; it wasn't dead, simply noisy (really noisy - the spin sound was just ridiculously loud, the seek noises were no worse than average) so I sent it back, and it was replaced with another as silent as it's partner. On installing and setting up the drives, all went well at first. I was surprised and impressed by the rapidity of the seek times, but the transfer rate - while very respectable from a single drive - was very poor when they were striped together on my HighPoint 374 controller. I decided I could live with it, and maybe that I'd do a bit more pre-purchase research in future. But after a few months... One of the drives started making a dreadful racket (like the first one I returned). I decided I... Read review

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Advantages: Easy to setup, well documeneted, great for overclocking
Disadvantages: Highpoint IDE controller

..., so in theory could take a total of 768 MB memory (I currently use 384 MB). The board is BX based and has two IDE controllers - the normal BX UDMA33 controller and an additional HigPoint controller. Between them they in theory allow the connection of 8 IDE devices. The HighPoint UDMA66 IDE controller is a bit of a "miss" though. The driver support is flaky and I've had enough problems with Win98 (system lockups, blue screens etc) to give up and disable it (though it seems fine in Win2000). Overall I'm well pleased, particularly with the speed I'm getting out of a PIII 700 (with not extra cooling or anything).... Read review

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