Installation and Setup
Getting the HighPoint e.SATA kit going was a relatively straightforward affair. I installed a pair of 80GB Western Digital 7,200 rpm UDMA-100 drives into the RocketMate 1200 enclosure, with only a little difficulty -- the drive mounting holes didn't quite match up with the ones in the RocketMate caddies, so both disks ended up tight against one side. Because of this, I found it easier to unscrew the IDE connector in the caddie, and plug it into the hard drive, and screw it back rather than try to slide the drive into it as the manual suggested.
Once mounted, the first thing you notice is that the IDE connector blocks access to the jumper on the WD drives. Luckily, I had the drives on Cable Select already, but felt Highpoint could have designed the drive connectors better so as to allow for easier jumper position changes.
Next, slide the caddies with the drives into the RocketMate 1200 enclosure, and remember to insert the key and turn the lock on the front panel. If you don't, the RocketMate 1200 won't power on. Not sure what to think of this, actually, and I was wondering why HighPoint didn't just put a fixed latching mechanism on the RocketMate 1200, rather than using keys that can get lost -- and, since they're just bog standard PC case ones, obtainable everywhere, don't perform any security function as such.
Pop open the computer case and find a spare PCI slot for the RocketRAID 1542 card, connect the external e.SATA cables (which seem to have IEEE-1394 connectors) and the 12V DC supply to the RocketMate and your hardware installation is done. When you boot up, the HighPoint BIOS for the RocketRAID 1542 manifests itself after POST, and provides a handy keyboard-driven interface to manage the disks in the RocketMate enclosure. All management functions are available from the BIOS interface, including creating and deleting RAID arrays, as well as renaming them. Note that while having similar functionality, the set-up utility has varying look-and-feel depending on the BIOS version you use. I preferred the later version, as it felt more refined and offered easier access to the management functions.
The BIOS utility lets you set the stripe for RAID-0 in a large number of sizes: 16, 32, 64, 128, 512, 1024, 2048kb -- as you will see from the benchmarks, the stripe size is very important for optimal performance. You can also select the type of RAID array to create in the BIOS utility: 0 (striping), 1 (mirroring), 1+0 (mirroring and striping) and JBOD (just a bunch of disks, or spanning).
Installing the drivers and management software for Windows XP was uneventful apart from the usual operating system paranoia about using non-Windows Logo certified drivers. Most of the physical work handling the disk array isn't done by the Highpoint RocketRAID 1542 card, but the Windows drivers. This is the typical approach for low-end RAID adapters, and it isn't necessarily bad -- it does require good driver-writing-fu though.
Highpoint also provides a fairly complete Windows management utility for the e.SATA kit, that allows you to create, delete and work with the drives with ease, and with good online help that explains not only what the program does, but also elaborates on some of the terminology used. Below are some screenshots from the Windows utility.
This is the main array create dialog -- the reason you're not seeing any disks listed is because the array has already been created.
Here's the delete array dialog -- no frills, but easy to use.
As you can see, Highpoint has gone through considerable trouble to explain what all the bits and pieces of the Windows tool mean.
And finally, you can get a overall system view of all your RAID arrays.
The entire installation process would earn top marks if Highpoint could fix the slight niggles with the physical installation of the drives. I did actually come across an annoying bug, while trying to get the CMOS set-up program on the test system to see the array, so as to pick it as the boot volume. With the supplied 1.20 BIOS, the Highpoint e.SATA array wasn't visible to the system BIOS, and couldn't therefore be used to boot from. With the 2.03s BIOS version, the e.SATA array showed up as a bootable volume, but the Windows driver and management tools couldn't see it. This could be due to a version conflict and we have notified Highpoint about the issue, and will update this section when they reply.
Update: 09 Dec. 2003- Installed the e.SATA RAID kit v2 on a fresh WinXP installation but with a different motherboard, and this time the new BIOS + Windows tools worked as advertised. One of those things I guess.
Next: Performance & Conclusions