PCI Express Battles PCI-X

HighPoint's RocketRAID 2320 PCIe Controller

We already reviewed Highpoint's RocketRAID 2220 PCI-X card, when we compared five of the latest SATA II RAID controllers. Thus, what we did here is simply to add the benchmark results of the PCIe version RocketRAID 2320 to our charts. Again, we mainly focused on I/O performance evaluation and benchmarks, since this is one of the most important measurements for RAID.

The 2320 is an x4 PCI Express RAID controller and is based on the same technology as the 2220. Thus, it also comes with eight SATA 2.5 ports, capable of running 300 MB/s per port, and supporting Native Command Queuing. Unlike older HighPoint RAID controller cards, the latest generation comes with a hardware accelerator for XOR operations, which is useful for RAID 5 arrays.

Thanks to its low profile, the RocketRAID 2320 can be deployed into all types of rack servers, including 1U units. HighPoint provides a low profile slot cover for this purpose.