HighPoint RocketRAID 1820, Continued

As our test results show, only 5 MB/s (!) from over 200 MB/s remains. It meant that the restore of our 260 GB or so array took around 13 hours.

Seek time is about 9.1 ms and thus slightly above the level of a single Western Digital Raptor. 3Ware takes a tad more time, RAIDCore a degree less. In this discipline, the SCSI RAIDs are unbeatable - even if the main reason for these fabulous values is mainly due to the hard drive's speed - 15,000 rpm.

That's living: eight connections for SATA hard drives

A lonesome potential transformer is on the card reverse.

The manual is satisfactory, although it only appears in English. The delivery of drivers and software on floppy disks is a thorny issue. The website provides no drivers for download if one gets broken.

That's the way to do it: eight cables in the package, one for each channel. What's more, in contrast to low-cost controllers, these are one meter long.

Despite extraordinary benchmark results in read mode, the RocketRaid 1820 has one weakness: performance breaks down dramatically in the event of a hard drive defect.