No questions for help, just wanted to share my experience with Highpoint's RocketRaid 2220 controller. It's a 8x SATA-2 controller in PCI-X form factor. Only few server/workstation based mobo's support PCI-X but the controller also functions in a regular 32-bit PCI slot. Cost I believe was $250 at newegg or zipzoomfly.

In a regular PCI slot I get 110MB STW (Sequential Transfer Write) which is about the maximum the 32-bit PCI bus supports. Initially I setup my RAID-5 with 5x Maxtor 300 GB drives, 4 of them in the raid array and one as hot spare. Last night I added a 6th drive and performed an online expansion, meaning a non-destructive expansion of the raid array while the array was fully accessible. This took 12 hours and after it had completed I only had to expand the volume in Computer Management | Disk Management.

At this point I'm highly satisfied with the controller. They also offer an 8-port PCI-E for the same money.

Thanks for sharing your success mephisto. Always nice to hear when something actually works right the first time.

IIRC, highpoint rocketraid was software based.

//krunk (^_^x)

Yes that is true, it relies on the host CPU. CPU utilization is low though, HD Tach reported I believe 4% on my Intel 3.2GHz CPU.