Testing

     Testing will be conducted with a system based on an ABIT NF7-S motherboard, AMD Athlon XP 2400+ running at 2255MHz, and 1gb of Corsair DDR. The internal hard drives will be a matched pair of Seagate's 120gb Barracuda SATA V hard drives. The external hard drives will be a pair of WD 80gb drives with 8mb cache. Both pairs of drives are extremely fast and still considered to be some of the best hard drives money can buy. Benchmarking will be conducted with a program call HD Tach, which measures data transfer speed, burst speed, random access speed, and CPU utilization. Here is how it went down:

Internal SATA RAID 0 (16k striping)

     The data read speed is very fast at an average of 54,230kps and a burst rate of 91mbps. The sequential speed is a little erratic, but this seems to be normal with these Barracuda V hard drives when in RAID. Still, not too bad considering these drives hold the operating system, which can really slow down the benchmark.

External Drive (single hard drive)

     This has got to be the fastest benchmark I have ever seen on an external hard drive enclosure! This is right on with what you would see if this drive was installed internally.

External Drives in RAID 0 (16k striping)

     Screaming data speeds! Keep in mind that these drives are IDE hard drives and not true SATA hard drives like you saw with the first benchmark. This is the reason for the lower speeds. Nevertheless, this is an incredible benchmark for external storage! Beat that with USB!

Conclusion

     I have to say I'm very impressed with what HighPoint Tech has done here. Yes, I'm even impressed with their RocketMate 1100 enclosures, although they do need a little work in the quality department. Regardless, the RocketMate 1100 enclosures kick butt! As for the RocketRAID 1542 host adapter, it is the best thing to happen to Serial ATA thus far. Having internal SATA RAID is great, but having external SATA and SATA RAID is awesome! e.SATA RAID really isn't convenient for transporting data, but keeping a pair of drives (non RAID) on your desktop for mass data transfer or just for data backup is perfect. Gone are the days of slow data transfer to an external storage device. Now we can backup data just as fast as we can with internal storage! The RocketRAID 1542 host adapter will receive a 9.5 rating and will bring home the ClubOC Seal Of Approval, while the RocketMate 1100 will receive a 8.5.

HightPoint Technology products are available at NewEgg.com.