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Techware Labs put this drive through its paces: HighPoint is making a determined effort to break into the expanding market for all levels of RAID servers. The 2000 and 3000 series of RAID controllers offer advanced features, high reliability and performance at a relatively low price point. In my previous review, I analyzed the performance of the RocketRAID 2640X4 in a RAID0 configuration for pure performance purposes. This review will shift focus on the more reliable RAID5 configuration.
Read the full review at TWL: HighPoint offers an open source driver for the RocketRAID 2640X4 the Linux kernel versions 2.4 and 2.6, for both 32bit and 64bit Intel platforms. This is a nice feature for the purist that wants to keep their systems free from proprietary drivers and modules. Major distributions like Fedora, RHEL, CentOS, OpenSuSE, SuSE, SuSE Enterprise, FreeBSD and Macintosh have binary packages provided for their respective package managers. Notably, HighPoint doesn't offer a pre-compiled version of their driver for Debian based distros. The lack of a binary driver package for Debian implies that Ubuntu Server is not directly supported, however the open source driver is easily compiled on any Linux platform with a modern version of the GCC compiler suite and the kernel headers installed. I did a test compile of the open source driver on Ubuntu server, and successfully got the driver compiled and loaded with no issues. The readme provided in the driver download is quite good and steps you through the way. While to the experienced Linux user, the compilation of a driver from source should not be a major issue, the newbie is warned in this case to RTFM. The open source driver also has the ability to be applied as a patch to the Linux kernel source, this means that if you are running a custom kernel that for some reason is binary incompatible with the provided driver, you can apply the patch and rebuild to obtain hardware support. |
