HighPoint Technologies RocketRAID Quad eSATA 6 Gbit/s for Mac Controller

HighPoint Technologies RocketRAID Quad eSATA 6 Gbit/s for Mac Controller

Customer Reviews and Ratings

3.0 out of 5 stars

Based on 7 reviews

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  • 4.0 out of 5 stars

    Built to run, not to sleep

    • Written by from Lincoln

    Did not need a driver for a summer 2010 12-core. With the driver installed the IO kit did not load. After uninstalling the driver and then installing only the RAID manager software, this card works fine.

    All in all, I am happy with this card. Its speed is good although I haven't benchmarked it. It works with some seriously aftermarket drive housings, which is impressive to me.

    This card doesn't fully support the Mac 'Sleep' power saving mode, so if you put the computer to sleep via the command or the powersaving options external drives may not be recognized until full restart. This is typical of some peripherals built for Macs and also for this sort of device. It's built to run as a RAID device, which would mean an interruption in its operation by sleep would not normally happen in the environment it's designed for.

    This isn't the kind of peripheral you'll want to use if you want totally seamless operation on a Mac--if you do, stick with FireWire or Thunderbolt, because using this device requires a little more fiddling than it might on a PC. The tradeoff is worth it, though. This is a fast card and I haven't experienced any non-user related crashes.

    4 Stars because it's not clearly labelled as a device which needs almost professional-level expertise to operate correctly.

    1 of 1 people found this useful

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  • 2.0 out of 5 stars

    Must Reboot to Recognize External Drives ~ Huge Negative

    • Written by from Provo

    I bought this card when ordering my Mac Pro from Apple last year based on the recommendations of their people on the phone. I very big disappointment to have to shut down my mac and reboot when I want drives to show up through this card. I do video editing and a ton of apps open at once, shutting down to access a huge numbers of drives is a huge pain, and I really find this recommendation a poor one.

    Their website is not one with answers, and I'm highly annoyed that I can't just attached drives and have them show up like would be the case with Firewire or even USB. With this, they are not recognized until after a reboot. What a pain, and time consuming to reload and open up all the applications and projects I have going simply to see another drive I might need access to. Poor recommendation Apple, I'm not happy.

    But is there a software update, fix, or workaround?

    5 of 5 people found this useful

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  • 1.0 out of 5 stars

    All three cards are problematic and slow

    • Written by from North Bend

    Really wanted to like this one. Bought 3 of these, 2 for work and one for home as I use really huge video files and wanted to have a raid 5 setup after a previous raid crash.

    Performance is abysmal. In a RAID 5 setup it the drives constantly drop out. With a 5 drive WD array at work, I was getting 110mb a sec. My Tempo Sata card was much faster and did not exhibit the random dropouts. Seagate drives fared no better, and basically it did not seem to matter what drives I was using the the dropouts still occurred.

    Also, tech support is non-existent. At present, I am already looking to replace all of them with something else that will work.

    1 of 1 people found this useful

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  • 5.0 out of 5 stars

    RR 640 with 3 x 64 GB crucial SSD

    • Written by from Plessis Robinson

    Works great with my Macpro early 2008 8 core 3 ghz

    I have to install EFI 32 so it is bootable

    7 of 7 people found this useful

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  • 5.0 out of 5 stars

    great fast cheap raid!

    • Written by from SUNNYVALE

    I have this installed in my early 2008 mac pro and have had no problems and have achieved aja benchmarks of 450mb! No sleep problems and the card was easy to install.
    The card is bootable and works with the highpoint rocketraid 2 port card also installed.

    12 of 13 people found this useful

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  • 1.0 out of 5 stars

    Incompatible with Western Digital My Book (USB/Firewire/eSATA) drives

    • Written by from Kaneohe

    I bought this card to use with several 1TB WD My Book triple interface drives (USB 2/Firewire 400/eSATA) and a 2010 Mac Pro. Whether formatted as RAID arrays or JBOD, the card cannot deal with these drives. They frequently spontaneously dismount, setting off a high pitched alarm (from the card). Also you must disconnect the drive(s) from the card before starting up the computer, or the computer will frequently refuse to boot.

    9 of 12 people found this useful

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  • 2.0 out of 5 stars

    Works OK, but does not wake from sleep...

    • Written by from Excelsior

    I'm using this card with a 2010 Mac Pro 12 Core/2.93 Ghz machine running OSX 10.6.4. Hooked up to four WD WD600 Velociraptors.

    The HighPoint RocketRAID works OK as long as the computer remains on, but if the machine is put to sleep for more than an hour or two, the card loses communication with the computer. Solution is to reboot. I was hoping the card would allow sleep, as advertised. I use my computer for music production, and often fill a LOT of memory up with samples (which takes a lot of time to load).

    Also, I have had no luck getting them to respond to questions via their support site.

    18 of 18 people found this useful

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