HighPoint RocketRaid 3522 Problems

[Jonathan Sager]

I just bought the 3522 and am having the same problem. I am using 8 Samsung 1TB RAID edition drives (HE103UJ’s) with an EnhanceTech 8-drive Multi-Link enclosure- Its formatted in RAID6 with a 256K stripe. I have not updated the firmware on my card. My system locks up when i render large numbers of 2K tiff or dpx files. I was excited to hear that the 64K block size made things better… then dissapointed to hear the problems recurred after a few weeks. I am a week off of starting a project that requires the full use of the RAID and am starting to get suspicious of the 3522 after only having it for a couple of days. Its caused a catastrophic crash twice now. I need to render hundreds of tiffs a day for the next couple of months and need a controller up to the task. Anyone had any luck?

[Randall Brown]

I still have not resolved this. I am in the process of RMAing the card. at this point I would NOT reco this card. I have Fiber, so I just sat the case and drives to the side and am working off fiber.

I do think this is a driver or firmware problem since writes work just fine. Maybe its connected to all the problems caldigit had perfecting their card to market. Who knows, but this thing is not a sound choice right now in my eyes.

I will update as i trouble shoot further, but i just dont have the time to mess with it everyday. let me know if you get your situation sorted.

[Mark Keck]

Randall,

I’ve been looking for info on the 3522 and ran across this thread. I know you said you’d update once you knew… and I don’t want to be a pest… but it’s been 8 days and I’m wondering if you’ve gotten any thing new on this???

Thanks,

Mark

[Jonathan Sager]

This card is junk… I just got an RMA for mine. In the meanwhile i got an Areca 1221x. Even this card has its problems. It locks up my system when i attempt to format an array in RAID6 (locks up during initialization, may work fine once its initialized, maybe not. I didnt want to wait to find out and just switched to RAID5) but seems to work fine in RAID5. It comes recommended for use with my octo 3.0ghz 2007 mac pro and OSX 10.5.3 by the guys at Enhance Tech. (Great company by the way.) I had the guys at Enhance help me out and they couldnt get the 3552 to work… Highpoint shipped them a new beta version of the card and a new beta driver and I am still waiting to hear whether the new card will work or not. Actually… I am not waiting to hear anything about HighPoint. I will never buy their products again. If i have any problems (other than the RAID6 one above) with the Areca 1221x i will post them in a new thread. So to sum up the general tone of this thread- stay away from the Highpoint 3552.

[Randall Brown]

My card is still sitting to the side. I have been working 12 hour days lately, so I dont have the time to card and fax the form back. Per the poster above he had better luck with Acerca. I will post once I have time to get this sorted, but they dont advance ship and its a 3 stage process to get the card back. For a professional this is simply too much. It pisses me off that they got so many good reviews everywhere. But as I write this, i should probaly go fax that form in.

[Jonathan Sager]

I just got this email from Enhance Tech regarding the 3522:

Hi Jonathan,
Just want to give you some updates on the HighPoint 3522.
Currently the 3522 is running good after updating the new driver and firmware from HighPoint. Hope you haven’t thrown the card to the trash can. We can update the firmware for you if you want so you can use it later on for other storage device. Let me know.
Have a great weekend.

So if you are wondering how to make your card work, the answer is in the firmware. I’ll find out more on the firmware revision that Enhance used and post here. Hope someone out there finds this useful. I however have already RMA’d my 3522.

[Greg Tiller]

Hi John,

I just purchased a 3522 myself and although I am not a Final Cut user, I am having similar problems.

I just created a 4 drive raid5 array in 10.5.4 using the driver on HPT’s website and was attempting to clone my regular partition onto the newly created riad5 using carbon copy cloner, I find that shortly after booting, when spotlight was attempting to index the file system, it would cause weird glitches.. mouse would get really fast then stop responding then back to normal, endlessly.. system becomes essentially unresponsive.

This sounds similar to your situation.. maybe not identical, but we may both be experiencing the same root cause.

Would you be willing to send me this firmware that fixes your problem? I’ll give it a try.

BTW how did you get in touch with highpoint tech? Do you have a contact to accelerate the process?

Thanks!
Greg

tiller@cs.dal.ca

[Jonathan Sager]

I’ll probably hear back from Patrick at Enhance Monday. They have a direct line of contact to Highpoint at Enhance Tech. Highpoint might have sent them beta firmware and drivers that are not available on their site yet… Enhance has been of great help to me, I can highly recommend them for their products and support.

[Greg Tiller]

Great, I look forward to it.

I found out some more info while troubleshooting:

– the card also has the same problem in XP and Vista
– the problem does not happen in RAID0, only raid5 (haven’t tested any other modes)

I email HPT and will get the ball rolling on their end also, but if you could email this beta firmware when you get it I’d greatly appreciate it!

Thanks,
Greg

[Jonathan Sager]

1.2.16.21 is apparently the firmware that Enhance is having luck with. It looks like the newest firmware that HPT has available is v1.2.13.25
Contact HPT and ask them about this revision.