14 DAY TRIAL // HighPoint Technologies, a company well renowned for its advanced storage solutions, has just announced the introduction of a new host bus adapter (HBA) solution range which can support up to 24 internal and eight external SAS 6Gbps ports.
The new RocketRAID series includes four HBA models and all of these use the PCI Express x16 interface, which HighPoint states is able to reach a maximum theoretical bandwidth of 19200MB/s.
Such high data transfer rates are necessary considering the top of the line HBA add-on card can support a total of 32 SATA 6Gbps drives.
This definitely isn't the first time that an HBA manages to offer as many ports as the RR2782, but HighPoint has taken a rather interesting approach when building its new bus adapter.
Compared to its competition, that tries to cram as many drives as possible on a single controller chip, HighPoint has decided to pair together up to four such ICs which are than liked together to the PCI Express x16 interface via a PLX bridge chip.
This enabled the company to deliver increased performance even when fast 15K RPM HDDs or solid state drives are being used and also allowed it to benefit from the bandwidth available to the PCI-E x16 interface.
Outside of its impressive performance, the new RockedRAID HBA series also comes with a complete real-time software management suite, which HighPoint calls a “System Management Interface,” AISM for short.
Thanks to this software, the administrator can actively monitor the temperatures of the hard drives and also set safety thresholds for all the storage enclosures connected to the HBA.
HighPoint's RocketRAID 6Gbps SAS HBA's are available for purchase right now from the company's distributors and resellers.
Pricing starts at $499 for the 16-port (external or internal) RR2744 and RR2740 and goes up to $699 for the RR2760 which packs 24 internal ports. The price of the RR2782 HBA, which features 24 internal and 8 external ports, hasn't been announced yet.