Introduction

SATA is here, and here to stay. Not everyone currently has the capability to run SATA drives from there motherboard, although if you bought your motherboard in the past 6 months then chances are you do have SATA onboard. But what if you don't? Well you can always upgrade your motherboard, but if you're happy with your system and don't want to upgrade & well all is not lost. Another good thing about SATA is that it can make for a quick and easy external storage medium, but of course you would need either a SATA to e.SATA adaptor, or a card capable of giving you e.SATA ports. This review is going to be a review of 2 halves, looking at a couple of peripherals from Highpoint that can give you all the above. Today we shall be looking at the Four Channel PCI host adaptor and the e.SATA External IDE Enclosure.

Specifications

RocketRAID 1542

Host side interface 32bit, 33MHz
Disk Interface Serial ATA/IDE
Number of SATA channels 2
Number of e.SATA" channels 2
Maximum number of drives 4
Supported Hard drives Serial ATA hard disks, IDE hard disk drives (with RocketHead 100 converter)
Supported RAID Levels
RAID 0, RAID 1, RAID 0/1, JBOD
Or:
RAID 5, RAID 0, RAID 1, RAID 10 (1/0) and JBOD*
Supported OSs Windows 98/ME, Windows NT4.0, Win2000, Windows XP, Linux (SuSE, Red Hat, Caldera, Turbo), and FreeBSD
RAID Management Tool RAID Configuration and Management
GUI Function RAID Configuration and Management (compatible with BIOS)
Kit Contents RocketRAID 1542 card
2 Serial ATA cables
Driver software
RAID Management software (Windows version)
User's manual

Additional Features -
Automatic e-mail notification when error occurs
Bootable array support
Large LBA support (drives larger than 137GB)

I just want to quickly comment here that according to the specifications this is a 32bit, 33MHz card, where as the 1520 is a 32bit, 33MHz/66MHz card. I would have thought that both cards would support 66MHz considering the potential speeds of SATA.

RocketMATE 1100

Outer Case size 176mm x 143mm x 70mm
Case Material Aluminum
Inner Case size Fits 3.5" factory IDE hard disk drives
Power Supply AC input: 100-240V
AV, 50-60Hz
DC output: 12V @ 3.7A
Interface -
e.SATA (External Serial ATA) to IDE
Supported hard drives IDE hard disk drives, up to ATA133

Yes you read that right, this unit takes standard PATA drives up to ATA133, which makes for quite a cheap and versatile idea since you could for example, throw in an old 200GB 5400rpm ATA100 drive.

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