Installation and Testing

     Physically installing the Rocket Raid card was no more difficult than any other PCI expansion card. It's size is no larger than any typical sound card, and there are no bulky connectors to block other PCI slots. With the smart location of the connectors on the top edge of the card, connecting or disconnecting the SATA cables will not require the card to be removed from its slot.  Moving on to the BIOS settings, I found it necessary to change the USB Keyboard and Mouse support in my motherboard BIOS from BIOS to OS in order for the Control-H command to let me into the RAID cards BIOS. Once that was done, I was able to complete the software portion of the RAID 0 array.

     Each option of the BIOS is numbered in the order the step will be performed. From the main menu we choose, Create Array. This takes us to the menu where we will select the (1) Type of Array [Raid 0] (2) Name of the array (3)  Select which disk drives will be included in the array (4) The block size of the array [16K] and then lastly (5) Start Creation Process. After those steps are complete, you should never need to enter the BIOS of the Rocket Raid again, unless something go drastically wrong. If in the unlikely event you do have serious problems with your array, the printed users manual contains detailed instructions which will guide you through a re-creation/repair process.

     The testing process will involve benchmark tests with Drive-Tach and SiSoft Sandra. The drives tested will be two Western Digital WD800JB 80 Megabyte '8 megabyte cache' drives configured in RAID 0 with 16 kilobyte cluster sizes using the Rocket Head 100 adapters. Windows XP Professional on an ABIT NF7-S running at stock speeds of: PCI 33MHZ, Front Side Bus 166MHZ and Overall processor 2075MHZ. 1 Gig of Corsair XMS3200C2 running on a 166MHZ memory bus.

     The Rocket RAID controller scores higher in the Sandra test than the other reference IDE RAID systems. The use of the Rocket Head adapters really helps keep cost down and makes migration to this system much more affordable. Until the internal technology of ATA drives improves the transfer rates and seek times, scores of even the Serial ATA drives will not increase dramatically over the parallel ATA units.

     Drive Tach shows the arrays read performance in relation to the position on the disk. In the beginning of the array (at 0 Gigs) read performance is at its highest at over 54000 kilobits per second. The tail end of the array (at 150Gigs) obviously has the worst performance at just over 32,000 kilobits per second. The average of 47652 kilobits per second also takes into affect the very large dips in performance. CPU utilization of 28.7 is rather high but can be attributed to the very small cluster sizes defined in the array.