SATA raid cards

I'm looking at buying the following:

Highpoint Rocket RAID 2320 PCI-Express 8-Port SATA-II RAID 5 Host Adapter

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/acatalog/SATARAID_Cards.html (2nd from bottom)

to use in a home file server. Initally I'm planning to have 3*320 or 400 drives in a RAID 5 array, but I'm a total novice when it comes to SATA raid cards, so I've got a few questions:

Down the line, will I be able to add additional drives to the array expanding the size of it?

If that isn't possible, can I simply say add another three drives and have a second RAID 5 array on the card, or can the card only manage one array with up to 8 drives as I think may be the case?

Are there any other cards people would recommend around this price point (£200)

thanks for any thoughts.

I'm using the same card, it's not bad for the price but it sometimes needs a bit of tweaking to get going properly.

will I be able to add additional drives to the array expanding the size of it?

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Yes, but you'll still need to use something like Partition Magic to extend the partition on the drive into the new space (or just create a new partition in Disk Management)

If that isn't possible, can I simply say add another three drives and have a second RAID 5 array on the card

Click to expand...

Yeah, no problem doing that.

Are there any other cards people would recommend around this price point (£200)

Click to expand...

I don't know of any at that sort of price, the only other decent RAID5 cards that I know of are the Areca & Broadcomm ones but they're £600+



As I mentioned the card might be a bit of a pain to start with, I had problems getting Windows to recognise the array. The card BIOS recognised the array and Windows recognised the card but not the array - turned out to be something to do with the card BIOS taking up too much RAM. Easy workaround was to hit the END key when the BIOS splash screen came up, this prevents the BIOS loading to RAM and everthing worked thereafter. There are a couple of settings which can be tweaked using the BIOS flash tool to effect a permenant fix, I forget exactly which ones but I've got a note at home. If you go for the card drop me a line and I'll point you in the right direction.