What's in the box?

     Besides the card, HighPoint gives you 8 very sexy looking blue Serial ATA cables. The cables are extra long too, perfect for server cases and full towers. The disks you see are the drivers disk and HighPoint Storange Management Software, which is optional. The Management Software has some great features and tools, and will come in extremely handy for Network Administrators. If you just use your server for file storage for your small business, the Management Software really isn't necessary.

All 8 ports are internal. They are stacked two by two for easy access.

Installation & Setup

     Installing the card took me only a few seconds. Installing a pair of SATA hard drives actually took longer... Once in, a quick boot and the first thing you see after the motherboard detects hardware is a blue HighPoint RAID screen. Simply hit Control + H and you're in the RAID setup utility. This is where you decide on what RAID level to use, as well as strip size. Today I will only test RAID 0 because I only have two SATA hard drives. As for stripe site, I always go with 16k for the best performance. The setup utility is extremely user friendly and totally self explanatory. I was in and out in seconds. Depending on your OS, all that is left to do is mount the drive or drives and assign drive names. A quick format and we're all done. From start to finish, it took me less than 10 min. No problems, no hassles.

     Above is a picture of the 1820A (top), and a normal 32-bit PCI card (below). As you can clearly see, there is a huge difference in the cards. Below is a picture of our Iwill MPX2 server motherboard. Check out the row of PCI slots. The two long PCI slots are 64-bit slots, which the RocketRAID 1820A must use. That is at least until PCI-X becomes commonly used.