Serial ATA Is Here: Seagate Barracuda ATA V and Five of the Latest Controllers Reviewed

HighPoint RocketRAID 1540

The RocketRAID 1520 is based on the HPT372, while the 1540 is based on its bigger brother, the HPT374, which is fitted with four Serial ATA ports rather than two.

The performance of the 1540 is satisfactory, even though it trails the 1520 in the WinBench 99 2.0 application benchmark. It is interesting that the RocketRAID 1520 has slightly less bandwidth when using our platform with the Intel chipset (81 as opposed to 84 MBytes/sec). We experienced the same thing with the Promise controllers.

The RocketRaid 1540 comes with a whole pile of cables, namely a power adapter and a data cable for each available port.

Also included are four Serial ATA adapters for connecting standard IDE drives.

As with the 1520, the 1540 is supplied with adapters for connecting UltraATA/66, UltraATA/100 or UltraATA/133 drives.