[Jonathan Sager]

I’ve been using an Areca 1280ML card with a ProAvio Box connected to my Octo MacPro for almost a year of daily use with no problems… I would wait and see what they send you as a replacement before scrapping the system… Are they offering you any kind of refund if it doesn’t work out? I had the same problem with the Highpoint card and switched to Areca… Have been very happy with the system ever since.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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?