HighPoint e.SATA RAID kit

Advantages: reliable, very upgradable, fast and very over-clockable.
Disadvantages: no HT support, only USB 1.1, did anybody get built in LAN?

...Blaster Live 5.1 Platinum. Since I've never used the built in one, I can't comment on it. Generally though they are not up to the standard of the high end Creative cards. I installed 2x 200gig IBM 7200rpm deskstars on the primary standard ide, and a dvd writer and cd writer on the secondary standard ide. On the Highpoint I installed 4x 200gig IBM 7200rpm desktars (primary ide master+slave and secondary ide master+slave). I use them as extra drives only, not as RAID. This is because if you upgrade the highpoint BIOS it can sometimes break the RAID stripe. I didn't want to risk that. This board supports ATA100 max. ATA133 drives work fine, but you will only get ATA100 transfer speeds through the bus. This board started life with a socket 478 Pentium4 Williamette processor at 1.5GHz. This lasted me for a while, and ran happily when clocked... Read review

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Advantages: online capacity expansion, deals with hard disc problems better
Disadvantages: slow compared to software RAID

..., the manual was bad... very bad! But to compared to others, it's what I expected. I have not bothered to refer to the PDF manual after my first read, as it was not technical enough and did not help with *ANY* RAID BIOS options! After installation, and setup of the 4 x 160gb SATA drives, the device was immediately recognised as /dev/sda1. If you are planning to do online capacity upgrades with linux. use the LVM first so it will be easier to resize the array later. I didn't bother as I would be replacing all this in a couple of years for something bigger. I am running it with a linux raid partition and reiserfs. ReiserFS has preformed pretty well, through hard disc crashes. But as usual.. I would recommend backups to DLT or another offline NAS General performance is good, tho software raid did give me 20k KB/s rebuild, where... Read review

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Advantages: Good price, excellent expandability
Disadvantages: Some HDD compatability issues to watch out for

..., there is an eSATA connector on the back, allowing an eSATA disk array to be connected and managed by the RouStor. Possibly the most important feature of this Network Attached Storage device is the automatic rebuild of your RAID data set. (Thankfully I have not had a disk failure, but I have tested this feature by pulling a disk out when the unit was running). If a disk fails in RAID1,5,6or 10 mode, then when you replace the faulty disk (as indicated by a fault LED on the front panel, next to the disk) then the unit will rebuild the data that was on that disk - in the case of RAID 5 and 6, from a combination of the remaining real data, and the parity, or, for RAID 1 and 10, a re-mirror of an existing disk. This process does take a long time. In fact, a very long time - I didn't time it exactly, but it was 12 hours or so, for the 500GB disk to be re... Read review

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