RAID: Redundant Array of Inexpensive/Independent Disks - all depends on which book or article you're reading as to how it is defined. For the user of of a RAID array it means grouping up two or more hard drives and making them work as a team instead of individuals. Surely by now most ClubOC visitors should have some understanding of just what RAID does and how it benefits us. HighPoint has some huge market penetration with their RAID products from Integrated Circuits provided as built-on solutions on motherboards or add-in PCI cards to bring RAID performance to every desktop, workstation or server.

     The RocketRaid 1542 has both internal and external connections and is based solely upon the Serial Advanced Technology Attachment (Serial-ATA/SATA) interface. Along with a transfer rate of 1.5 Gigabytes/second, Serial ATA offers many other advantages over the now [quite] aged parallel ATA standard, mostly dealing solely with the cable. First, A point-to-point interconnect enables use of full bandwidth on each device. Second, the cable isn't required to carry as much voltage and has a lower pin-count so the overall size of the cable has been drastically reduced. Lastly, A higher fault tolerance has added to the maximum allowable cable length.

     The RocketRAID 1542 has two internal and two external Serial-ATA connections. While the purpose of the internal connection is quite obvious, the external connections are proprietary and will require the use of the RocketMate 1000 which is sold separately but will featured in this review. Also included in the retail kit of the RocketRAID 1542 is a Windows 98/ME, NT4, 2000, and XP driver disk, along with a Windows based RAID administrator application. Two VERY LONG (39 inch) Serial ATA cables are provided to jumpstart a RAID array.

     The RocketRaid 1542 supports RAID 0, 1, 0/1 and JBOD. RAID 0 'Data Striping' is the mode which will be tested in this review due to performance enhancing abilities. In a RAID 0 array data is divided among the installed drives in a pre-determined length of bytes known as the stripe size. The available stripe sizes with the RocketRaid 1542 are: 2M, 1M, 512K, 256K, 128K, 64K, 32K, 16K. In theory, the lower the stripe size the higher the performance of the array. The trade off will be in overall system overhead, because with the lower stripe size you are causing much more  PCI bus traffic which the CPU has to direct.

     RAID 1 is nothing more than a full-time data redundancy array in which anything written to the primary disk will be mirrored on the secondary disk. This offers a method of data security that requires no management from the user once the original hardware configuration has been setup. RAID 0/1 offers the performance of striping with the data redundancy of mirroring. Of course this means that more drives will be required in the array, and in the case of this RAID controller you have the ability to connect four drives. JBOD (also known as JOBD) means something to the effect of Just One Big Disk, taking the total capacity of all connected drives and combining it to form one logical drive. Again, once the array has been configured and installed there will be no further management required by the user.

     Serial ATA to IDE adapters have been developed to enable connection of Parallel ATA devices to Serial ATA controllers. HighPoint has manufactured a converter named the RocketHead 100. Each RocketHead comes with the interface adapter and a "Y" power cord. A small floppy type power cord is plugged into the converter while the 4-pin Molex connector is plugged into the actual hard disk. From there, the Serial ATA cable is plugged into the adapter and the controller. Jumper settings on the hard drive MUST be set to a master/single drive configuration for the adapters to work. The RocketHead 100 adapters are only sold with certain retail kits so make sure you check the packaging or product description carefully before you make you final checkout. If you need RocketHead adapters they are also provided in a stand-alone package.

     There have been many discussions that have questioned the actual practicality of an interface that only allows the connection of one device per channel. When you take into account that the Serial ATA interface is only augmenting and not replacing the Parallel ATA interface, a typical SATA equipped machine will allow the total connection of up to six devices! Two of which will be hard disk drives and the other four can be spread out among the other parallel ATA devices available, CD-R/W, DVD-ROM, ZIP disks.