Introduction

 

Serial ATA is now a must have for every computer users. If you have a SATA HDD or not, it doesn't matter, SATA is here to stay and IDE is on its way out. Servers now have no excuse for not having SATA. PCI, PCI-X or PCI-E solutions now are on the market and with features including support for 8 devices and over, SCSI is sure to see the scrap pile in the very near future.

 

Highpoint has been one of the more server orientated controller providers. While they do have a variety of desktop controllers, their server versions have far greater features and support. All of Highpoints desktop SATA solutions are IDE controllers with PATA to SATA bridges, where as the server cards are all based on the native SATA protocol allowing for full 150MB/s and now 300MB/s with SATA-II ports.

 

Today we are looking at what could be the last of the PCI-X based SATA-II controllers to see the light of day. Here we have on our test bed the Highpoint RocketRAID 2220 PCI-X SATA-II controller card for the server environment. Let's find out what it has to offer.

 

EDITOR UPDATE: We made an error in saying that the Highpoint RocketRAID 2220 PCI-X SATA-II controller supports RAID 6. In fact, it does not support RAID 6 functions.