Highpoint sell a line of low-cost disk and RAID controllers with Linux drivers and utilities. While the price point of these devices is excellent, you get what you pay for to an extent; reports of their tech-support are mixed at best (I’ve not experienced it myself) and the quality of their install documentation and packages aren’t great.
I recently purchased a 640L RAID controller and spent more than 2 days getting it working with the current Debian stable. After much wailing and gnashing of teeth I’ve ironed out all the kinks and the result is not too bad. Write speeds >300MB/s and read speeds of around 200MB/s across 3 Western Digital “Red” 1TB HDDs in a RAID 5 configuration. That’s is about as good as you could reasonably expect from this arrangement.
So that you don’t have to experience the same frustration, and because I couldn’t find any similar documentation online when I was looking, here is a step-by-step to getting the driver and utilities installed on Debian “Wheezy”