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Rosewill 2port SATA PCI card review

Posted by nd4spdbh | Published in Storage/HDD | [-no comments-]

Review by nd4spdbh

Today I will be reviewing the Rosewill RC-201 2 port SATA card. It supports Raid 0 1 and hot swapping and does a decent job for light use.The card comes in a smaller box with Rosewill’s name and model number nicely printed on it. The contents include the low profile card, a low profile PCI bracket, as well as a normal PCI bracket, a driver CD, and a skimpy looking manual.

The card is run by Silicon image’s 3512 chipset and provides 2 SATA 150 ports configurable into a raid 0, raid 1, or separate drive arrays. It is based off the 3112 chipset and has been redesigned to provide an even better performance to price ratio for the end user. The 3512 chipset works with all SATA 1 devices (and most likely SATA 2 devices as they are backwards compatible) which means SATA CD and DVD drives will work with this card. You can also run multiple cards with the 3512 chipset to provide even more connectivity. Silicon image also provides drivers for windows and Linux for the 3512 chipset.

Installation

Installation was a breeze I simply plugged the card into an open PCI slot and hooked 2 spare Seagate 80gb SATA drives up to it for testing. I turned the pc on and after the POST process but before the Windows XP loading screen came up (windows was installed on a separate PATA hard drive) I was greeted by the bios for the Rosewill raid card. I didn’t go into the bios at this time as I wanted to install the drivers as well as get single drive performance numbers.

Upon booting into windows I was greeted with the familiar screen, the found new hardware wizard. The manual has you install the drivers with the hardware wizard so I just followed directions, pointed to the correct directory (stated in the manual) on the driver CD provided, and walla installed without a hitch and I could format and access the 2 drives without problems. While I was at it I also installed the raid software which allows you to create, destroy, and modify raid arrays along with single drives. The software is alright, about all you can expect for the price of the card, it did what it was supposed to do but I did have the software crash on me 2 or 3 times, and the interface is not super frilly, say the difference between windows 2000 and vista.

Performance

This card did a decent job in performance for what it is. The first thing I did was get a benchmark of a single drive and then using the software I created a raid 1 (mirroring) volume out of the two identical drives. As you can see performance is the same when comparing a single drive (blue line) to the raid 1 array (red line), minus a decrease in burst speed everything is right about the same.

The next thing I did was break the raid 1 array back into separate drives and then made a raid 0 array, all using the software provided within windows. I used a 16k stripe as that is what I have found works best with these drives on any raid controller. Using HD Tach I ran a benchmark of the 2 drives (blue line) and then compared the same drives with the same stripe size (16k) using my onboard ICH7R raid controller (red line). As you can see there is an obvious bandwidth limitation using raid 0 on the Rosewill card at right around 82MB/s. This might not affect a single drive that’s faster than 82MB/s but I did not have fast enough hardware to try.

As you can see performance is limited with the Rosewill card, being 10MB/s less in average read and ~ 63MB/s less in burst, but random access times and CPU usage are the same.

Hot Swapping

Hot Swapping worked with out a hitch with single drives on the Rosewill card, simply unplug the drive or plug it in and you’re off. As for unplugging or plugging a drive in that was in either a raid 0 or 1 array that’s where it starts to get bumpy and this is when the software crashed trying to reinitialize the raid array. So don’t go hot swapping drives that are in an array with this card.

Bios

The bios options of this card are similar to many of the ICHxR interfaces with simple options to create and destroy raid arrays. I never had a problem while I was within the bios and it’s very easy to navigate.

Conclusion

The Rosewill RC-201 2 port SATA to PCI adapter is a great little card for the price. The software works but is not prettiest out there and the card does have its bandwidth limitations. But for a person looking to make a storage server out of an old computer but wants to use new SATA 1TB drives, and where speed isn’t a major issue this would be a great little card, allowing the use of the newer more clean SATA interface on old hardware. Overall I give this little baby a 7.5/10.

PS, thank you IKIKUINTHENUTZ for funding, and OCpulse for the space to post!!!