HighPoint Rocket 640L PCI-Express 2.0 x4 Low Profile SATA III (6.0Gb/s) RAID Controller Card

Pros: None

Cons: Yes you can hook an ssd to it but you won't be able to get even half the advertised speed of your ssd I.E. the Samsung 840 Pro.

Other Thoughts: Go ahead and be a sucker like me and by this sub standard card.

Pros: It is tiny and it works. Adds four SATA ports. It shows up as an AHCI device so no special drivers are needed for Linux or Windows 7/8. Included four SATA3 cables, one for each port. Also includes full and half-height brackets in case you are installing it in a small system. Already has the latest BIOS installed, nothing needed to be updated.

Cons: No cons so far. It does exactly what I expected it to do.

It may only operate at x1 speeds on some older systems depending on the PCIe port features.

Other Thoughts: Didn't bother using the RAID functionality on this card or installing the special tools. Just attached my disks and left them unconfigured and they will show up as individual drives to the OS. I use mdraid in linux to make my RAID5 and everything works fine while not being married to any particular RAID hardware. I could hook them up via USB SATA adapters if I wanted to get at my data if I really had to.

Pros: Easily configured with the supplied OS drivers (Windows 7 / 64 bit). Works OK as a simple sata port controller for CD/DVD, but that's it in my own build.

Cons: Can't update the drivers with the supplied CD. Windows keeps telling me the correct driver is loaded, despite having the disk. OS tells me that the supplied disk has an incompatible driver.

Other Thoughts: I think the issues I'm seeing is due to a conflict with my onboard Marvel raid controller. I was OK with settling for CD/DVD control, but the driver issues are inducing latency and causing issues with my sound. Pulled it, and all is well. Card is of no value to me, and I've spent a LOT of time trying to make this work. I'll end up eating the cost of this one, but I will stear clear of this manufacturer.

Pros: Super fast! Works flawlessly in Ubuntu 12.04 (Amahi Home Server) I was able to get higher average speeds on this card, than the SSD specifications... fluke?

Like most things in Linux, it worked from the first boot and I had to do nothing special!

Works with 4TB drives under GPT no problem!

Cons: Its so tiny and my case is so large my SATA cables barely reach... but they do... I will need to get longer ones so I can route them properly though.

Other Thoughts: I was afraid to buy this as some reviews said it was slow and the linux reviews were not stellar... I can say that this works perfect in my install and meets all my expectations very well!

Pros: After making the array in the boot menu (very easy), the array showed up in my bios as a marvel controller drive and was bootable. Install linux mint across my array and everything worked flawlessly. No drivers needed, even in utilities like clonezilla. Great little card for the price!

Cons: I tried putting two samsung 840 pro SSDs in raid 0 and was disappointed to only get 630MB/s (mobo raid in windows got over 900 in as ssd). I'm not sure if my inconsistent benchmarking techniques are to blame however.

Pros: It came in a box.

Cons: This card used the Marvell 88SE9235. Many problems when attempting to create an md raid. The drives kept hard resetting. I was never able to get my raid setup up and running.

Ideally you will want to purchase a real raid card, without a lower end Marvell chipset, if you want anything but jbod expansion.

Other Thoughts: I have a HighPoint RocketRaid 2220 card that I purchased in 2008 and this card is still humming along running a 3TB storage solution in raid 5.

An oversight on my part. I may buy HighPoint in the future but I'll need a few years to recover from this Marvell fiasco.

Pros: Worked great... when it worked

Cons: My computer would not boot up after two months of use. I was getting the error message "!!! x64 exception type - 00000000000000000 !!!!!!!" After removing the PCIe device it booted fine.

Pros: You can in fact boot from the drives attached to this unit without jumping through any hoops (except that a CD drive attached to it doesn't show up as CD/DVD in the bios, but that's no big deal). Drives attached to it are recognized in both Windows 7 Ult and Ubuntu 12.04, and seem to work fine.

Cons: For such an expensive unit (compared to similar ones on NewEgg), I'm disappointed that it's not actually PCIe x4 as advertised, at least as far as I can tell. Attached to either PCIe 2.0 x4 or x8 slots on my mobo (Gigabyte brand), the unit's little bios always shows it as PCIe x2 at 5gb/s. That's fine for one or more spinning drives, but if you're thinking you're going to put a couple SATAIII SSDs in there in a RAID and have it keep up, I doubt you'll get more than 5gb/s no matter what you do. I haven't been able to test its max speed with e.g. 2x SSDs in a RAID, but the minimal bios settings don't seem to allow you to change the speed setting.

Other Thoughts: I'd give it 2.5 eggs if possible - it can have 3 because it works and things can boot from it. It would have gotten more eggs if it a) didn't claim to be PCIe 2.0 x4, or b) if it were priced similarly to comparable units. I thought the extra ~$30 was going to be worth it, but it probably wasn't. If it's only x2 and 5gb/s, I wish they'd tell you that instead of *explicitly* saying otherwise.

Pros: Seq. Read 5557 MB/s
Seq Write 501 MB/s
Ran Read 90460 IOPS
Ran Write 71520 IOPS

Cons: none really, I would not connect more than one SSD to it but it might be able to handle the through put

Other Thoughts: Great add-in card for Intel X58 owners.

Pros: Rocket 640L boots much faster than RocketRaid 640L.
Rocket 640L is Recognized as RAID device under Mountain Lion 10.8.x
But RocketRaid 640L is recognized as Parallel SCSI

Cons: None if RAID 0 and RAID 1 are what you need.

Other Thoughts: I owned both Rocket 640L and RocketRaid 640L. I know Rocket 640L is based on Marvell 88SE8230, RocketRaid 640L is baed on 88SE8235, Marvell 88SE8230, is better than 88SE8235. it supports RAID 0 and RAID 1 natively. But 88SE8235 has no RAID functions at all. That is why HighPoint choose it as "plain paper" to draw "HighPoint RAID Functions"