14 DAY TRIAL // HighPoint is all set and ready to start turning heads with its latest addition to the long line of “world's first” devices. Eager to start catering to the needs of end-users for high-speed storage, the company has put together what is called the industry's first four-port native SATA 6Gb/s RAID host adapters. Powered by the PCI Express 2.0 x4 bus, the RocketRAID 640 series will enable new levels of throughput, will remove performance bottlenecks for storage devices and allow users to increase their storage capacities as they see fit.
The RocketRAID 640 native SATA 6Gb/s host adapters can reach the impressive throughput of up to 600MB/s per SATA port for legacy systems, with current configurations being able to maximize PCI Express 2.0 x4 bandwidth to reach no less than 2GB/s. This means that high-performance SATA HDDs and SSDs will no longer be restricted by older bus technologies, being able to reach their full potential or even break the performance barrier thanks to the large bandwidth of the PCI Express 2.0 x4 bus.
Not only that, but the four ports, as well as the support for port multiplier devices, can allow end-users to increase their system's storage capacity to new levels. By using the HighPoint RAID management utility, storage capacities can be scaled to 20 SATA devices (up to 40TB of disk space) by means of the OCE (Online Capacity Expansion).
An added benefit for end-user convenience is the backwards compatibility provided by the RocketRAID 640 series with all SATA HDDs ( 3.0, 2.0 and 1.5). This means that systems can gradually transition to SATA 6Gb/s with no need of special cables or connectors. The RocketRAID 640 and RocketRAID 644 are priced at $196.90 and $240.90, respectively, and are sold exclusively through HighPoint's channel distributor partners, namely ASI, Malabs, D and H and Bell Micro.