HighPoint 2300 PCI-E RAID Card

[Froggy]

So I decided that I wanted to give RAID 5 a try and I was already using 3 of my 4 SATA ports on my Mobo, plus I had heard/read NF4 RAID 5 was ugly.

So I started looking around for a add-in card and ended up deciding on the Highpoint series as it was built on PCI-E and was very reasonably priced. I bought the 2300 model which is a 4 channel x1 card and paired it with 3x Seagate 7200.9 160GB HDDs. ST3160812AS to be precise.

Anyhow I thought I would give some feedback on my experience.

I had already read I needed to flash the card to the latest firmware which was super easy thru a windows flash utility. Once I got the array initialized and formatted I did some "Speed" tests. I was copying files from a 2x74GB WD Raptor 16K stripe on the NF4 RAID for reference. I did the following 5 copies to and from the arrays. The entire America's army game(2.49GB), 300MB .wma files, 600MB .wmv files, 16 misc. uninstalled apps., & 1 300MB App.

The average write speed was 69MB/sec & the average read speed was 100MB/sec.

For the $120.00 I spent on this card I am very happy with my investment.

p.s. The array took 36 min. to build.

[Froggy]

I added HD Tach scores compared with my Raptor RAID 0 array and my Raptor Pagefile HDD.

http://webpages.charter.net/tdawes/Misc./PC%20Pics/HDD%20Tach%20Scores.JPG

[Froggy]

ttt

[Froggy]

ttt

[g0dM@n]

you used a separate hard drive SOLELY for pagefile??

i just turn pagefile off (I'm sure ppl would beg to differ). I see no need for pagefile when I'm running WinXP with 2gigs.

I've had it like this for months, but just last night my machine was acting funky and I had to reboot. I wonder if it has to do with pagefile being off. I don't do anything that ever maxes out my RAM though.

[Froggy]

When I play HL2 @ 1920x1200 8xAA 16xAF when loading between "levels/scenes" the game would stutter for 1-3 seconds. using a separate drive for the pagefile, that stuttering fell to less than a second. More like a hiccup & MUCH less invasive to the game immersion.

At those settings, according to Rivatuner, I am using 1800MB of RAM & 1900MB of pagefile. The video card is using about 500MB of VRAM. I also tell HL2 that I have more RAM to allow it to cache more into RAM.

[g0dM@n]

When I play HL2 @ 1920x1200 8xAA 16xAF when loading between "levels/scenes" the game would stutter for 1-3 seconds. using a separate drive for the pagefile, that stuttering fell to less than a second. More like a hiccup & MUCH less invasive to the game immersion.

At those settings, according to Rivatuner, I am using 1800MB of RAM & 1900MB of pagefile. The video card is using about 500MB of VRAM. I also tell HL2 that I have more RAM to allow it to cache more into RAM.

rivatuner gives you those values? i didn't know that.

so what do you set your pagefile to? i have 2x74 gb raptor 16meg raid0, and a 750gig WD sata. i guess i could set pagefile on the separate 750gigger...

[noegruts]

ttt

Any particular reason you keep bumping a year-old thread?

[g0dM@n]

Any particular reason you keep bumping a year-old thread?

no one replied. he probably wanted some input.

[Froggy]

Any particular reason you keep bumping a year-old thread?
I am selling this add-in card & brought this thread back for reference.

[Froggy]

rivatuner gives you those values? i didn't know that.

so what do you set your pagefile to? i have 2x74 gb raptor 16meg raid0, and a 750gig WD sata. i guess i could set pagefile on the separate 750gigger...

Yeah in Rivatuner under settings, you can add those graphs under monitoring.

I pick a HDD & partition the first 3.5-4GB of that drive, & make that my pagefile partition. I then pick that drive letter set a 1024-3072MB pagefile amount. I make sure to remove the allocated setting for my C: drive so that it actually goes to the other drive.

p.s. you may have to leave a 2MB pagefile on C: partition. It has been since last April that I last formatted & did all of this.