For the asking price of close on $500 USD (or about $650 AUD), the package is actually quite basic. Having said that though, the package includes everything you will need to make full use of the RocketRAID 2340 controller. Once you’ve open up the large and stylish-looking box, you are greeted with all of the goodies.
First up you get the card itself which is nothing entirely special to look at along with an extensive manual written in English, which goes into plenty of detail about features and installation. Next up you have a CD that includes drivers (the card works in Windows XP, Windows XP 64-bit, Windows Vista (woo!), Linux and FreeBSD) but as always you should go online first and download the latest drivers. You’ve also got RAID management software and an electronic copy of the manual.
Most importantly you are also given four Mini-SAS to SATA cables made by the folks over at Foxconn that provide the connection for all of the 16 hard drives. Each Mini-SAS cable has a total of four SATA connectors that are protected by mesh shielding and protected at both ends to avoid cable fray. Our only disappoint with the cables is that they aren’t the newer type which are able to lock into place at the hard drive end but at the same time they seem to be much more difficult to remove from hard drives or SATA ports than regular old SATA cables.
The cables are all one meter long and while that’s going to be a good thing for IT server managers or end-users with huge cases, for the average user with a standard full tower ATX case, it might end up causing some cable clutter issues. At the same time, if you’re using a “smaller” full tower ATX consumer case, you probably won’t be using all of the include Mini-SAS cables as there isn’t enough room inside your cases for that many drives, anyway. During our testing, we just used a single cable and while it does add to cable clutter, they can be easily hidden away, like under your optical drive (like we did) and not hinder vital air flow all that much.
The included RAID management software is quite advanced and it allows you to do such things as setup SMTP e-mail alerts that quickly send you out a message when the RAID has failed or something has gone wrong in the setup. For a product of this kind though, you would expect nothing less.
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