Accordance ARAID 2200-GP RAID 5.25" Bay

Over the past couple of years RAID has been coming as a standard feature on motherboards. Although RAID is nothing new to performance systems the cost in the past to obtain a RAID controller card was enough to make most shy away from setting up a gaming system, home, or small business server with it. Those who had some money to burn obtained two drives and a Promise or Highpoint card which would enable them to get disk access times and transfer rates that were far faster than a single drive. The select few who either had a lot of money to burn or had access to retired server hardware were able to pull together a SCSI PERC controller and two or more SCSI drives. The drive access times with this PERC setup were something to be desired. Though the down fall was heat and energy use. More recently RAID setups involve standard off the shelf hard drives and onboard controllers which are far cheaper and consume less energy. Now RAID isn't all about speed, there are RAID configurations that are designed to preserve your data such RAID1 (mirror of two volumes or drives). The onboard RAID motherboards usually require the end user to build their OS from scratch in order to load the drivers for the RAID subsystem. The reload of an OS with a RAID system involved has been out of reach to the average PC user until recently. The engineers at Accordance Systems have designed several products with RAID1 in mind and as such they have sent us their ARAID 2200-GP to be reviewed, so let’s take a look.