HighPoint RocketRAID 2720SGL
The HighPoint RocketRAID 2720SGL is a SAS RAID controller with eight internal SATA/SAS ports, each of which supports 6 Gb/s. According to the manufacturer, this low-profile card is targeted at the storage needs of SMEs (small and medium enterprises) and at workstations. The card shares its small dimensions and its eight-lane PCIe 2.0 interface with its competitors. Its core component is Marvell’s 9485 RAID controller.
Besides JBOD, the card supports RAID 0, 1, 5, 6, 10, and 50.
Besides the model we're testing today, HighPoint's low-profile 2700 series features four other models, RocketRAID 2710, RocketRAID 2711, RocketRAID 2721, and RocketRAID 2722, which mostly differ with respect to port type (internal/external) and port count (four or eight). Our sample, the RocketRAID 2720SGL is the least-expensive RAID controller in this story, selling for about $170. Note that this model doesn't include any cables, though, which cost extra.
Performance
Sequentially reading/writing a RAID 0 array consisting of eight Fujitsu MBA3147RC disks, the HighPoint RocketRAID 2720SGL achieves an excellent read rate of 971 MB/s and is only beaten by LSI's MegaRAID 9265-8i. The write result of 697 MB/s isn't as impressive, however, barely exceeding the Adaptec RAID 6805's write speed. The RocketRAID 2720SGL turns in a number of mixed-bag results like that. In RAID 5 and 6 it tops the other cards, but at RAID 10, read speeds drops to 485 MB/s, the lowest value among the four test samples. The sequential write speed in RAID 10 is even worse, yielding a paltry 198 MB/s.
This controller clearly wasn’t built for SSDs. Its read rates max out at 332 MB/s and the writes peak at 273 MB/s. Even the Adaptec RAID 6805, which also doesn't showcase the performance of solid-state storage very well, yields two times the throughput. Understandably, then, the HighPoint controller has no chance at all against the two cards that do handle SSDs well: Areca's ARC-1880i and LSI's MegaRAID 9265-8i, which are about three times faster.
The best word we can use to describe the HighPoint card's I/O performance is probably adequate. As a result, the RocketRAID 2720SGL falls into last place in all four Iometer benchmarks. The HighPoint controller can almost keep up with the other cards in the Web server benchmark, but trails its competitors by a significant margin in the other three metrics. This becomes very evident in the SSD tests, where the RocketRAID 2720SGL demonstrates that it is not optimized for solid-state drives. It squanders the advantage inherent to SSDs in place of hard drives. For instance, the RocketRAID 2720SGL posts 17 378 IOPS in the database benchmark, while LSI's MegaRAID 9265-8i clocks in at more than four times that, 75 037 IOPS.
