The integrated controller will get the job done if you have less than 6~8 (depending on the motherboard) hard drives but it soon will hit its limits in a professional environment. In addition, despite the fact that many high-end motherboards come with a few eSATA ports to be used with external storage, these ports usually cannot take the advantage of internal ports’ ability to offer RAID’s performance and redundancy. This is where a dedicated RAID controller will be very useful.

We have previously looked a few of these controllers in the past (RAID 2: A Look at the PCI Players) and today, we will delve into two more controllers which are slightly different from what we have previously reviewed. These controllers that we are looking at today are designed specifically for the external storage usage. The two expansion cards from HighPoint Technologies, the Rocketraid 2224 and RR231xPM, have similar features yet there are some subtle distinctions between them. Let’s take a closer look at these cards.