Specifications, Pricing and Availability

HighPoint doesn't give us a lot of information on their website about the 2720SGL. In fact, they don't even have a dedicated webpage for the product, just a webpage for the 272X Series of products. From there you have to look for the 2720SGL. Once you find it, you get the specifications we've shown above.

The interface back to the host system is a PCIe 2.0 8x lane connector that can be used in either an 8 or 16 lane slot. Two adapters ship with the card; a low profile and a standard desktop profile. On the back of the card two SFF-8087 ports allow you to connect the card to your drives through breakout cables; two are required to connect up to 8 drives. You can also purchase SFF-8087 to SFF-8087 cables if you have backplanes that support this connector.

The RocketRAID 2720SGL supports the latest SATA / SAS 6Gb/s protocol, so your new drives are supported at full speed. We'll test the controller with some of the latest SSDs to see how it fairs with SandForce's latest 500+MB/s drives today. The 2720 is designed for use with traditional mechanical platter drives, though, so users looking to take advantage of large capacity storage are the target audience.

The software RAID controller supports RAID 0, 1, 5, 6, 10, 50 and JBOD. RAID 6 is the standout here for users looking for the most redundancy. In RAID 6 up to two drives can fail before you start to lose data on the third failure. This is a feature that until now was only found on more expensive RAID controllers.

The price of the HighPoint 2720SGL is what makes the controller so attractive, though. At just 139.99 at Newegg at the time of writing, the controller is quite a bargain. Adding to the overall value is HighPoint's 3-year warranty.