Introduction

If you wait long enough, sooner or later all technology trickles down to a point where price is no longer an issue. The HighPoint RocketRAID 272X Series of products is a very good example of this. The 272X Series is a low cost product line that delivers a large amount of technology at a reasonable price. Today we are looking at the 2720SGL, a sub 140 Dollar SATA/SAS software RAID controller that now supports RAID 6.

The RAID 6 feature is a big advancement for this price point and so far we've been unable to find anything on the market to even compare the 2720SGL to. The price is amazing, but today we will see if the performance follows the price to the ground level or if the controller is good value.

HighPoint has six products in the 272X Series. The base 2720SGL that we are looking at today ships without cables. The 2720 standard package includes cables that run from the controller to backplane systems, something most end users looking to add drives to the system will not need since they need SFF-8087 to SATA or SAS drive connections. We feel there isn't any reason to purchase cables that you won't need. In the long run, though, you still need to buy cables to get the SGL version up and running, but they can be found for as little as 10 Dollars each.

Let's take a look at the specifications and then see how the HighPoint 2720SGL performs.