RocketRAID or Sonnet 4+4 Serial ATA card?

[Shane Ross]

I hear good things about the sonnet. It is on my list when I eventually end up getting my SATA RAID Array.

[Andy Mees]

you might want to have a look/read at barefeats.com

they’ve looked at the Sonnet4x4
https://www.barefeats.com/hard44.html

the Highpoint RocketRAID 1820A
https://www.barefeats.com/hard42.html

and the Highpoint RocketRAID 2220A
https://www.barefeats.com/hard53.html

they were pretty happy with the Sonnet 4×4 performance
but didn’t seem so pleased with the 1820A, seemed a bit flaky (there may have been driver updates since then)
the 2220 looked interesting for their RAID5 support

hope it helps
Andy

[Andy Edwards]

Been running a 4+4 for almost a year. First under 10.3.9 and now under tiger and 10.4.2 Works like a champ, except for the occasional boot up issue. Just have to start the drives up a little longer, then the G5. Only have external hooked up right now with 4 X 300gig Maxtor 16mb cache drives in a Burly box. Been hammering away on a behind the scenes for a feature film coming out and the card handles the 800 gigs of uncompressed files just fine. Wish I had known about the 8 port external card, but you have to go with what is available at the time.

Andy

[Scott Dominick]

So it looks like the Sonnet card is the favorite card ’round these parts. The only thing holding me back is the lack of RAID5. Other than the RocketRAID there is Netcell’s product which has RAID XL, which is like a hybrid of RAID3 and RAID5. The problem with this card is it is a 32bit 33mhz card. So you can never achieve really high sustained data rates. I believe the card can get up to 110MB/s, which isn’t bad but isn’t as good as these other cards.

Any thoughts,
Scotty D