HighPoint Technologies Brings SATA 6Gb/sec To Legacy Systems Via PCIe Card

Outside of solid state technology, the newest SATA interface is probably the biggest thing to happen to the storage industry in the past few years. We're talking about SATA 6Gb/sec, which doubles up the SATA 3Gb/sec interface that most hard drives and systems are tailored to work with today. This obviously speeds up transfers, and since it works with traditional hard drives, it offers another method for increasing your speed without shelling out hundreds and hundreds for SSDs.

HighPoint Technologies has just announced a product that makes the process of integrating SATA 6Gb/sec into your existing desktop a lot easier. The RocketRAID 640 series is described as the industry’s fastest SATA 6Gb/s RAID host adapter, and it's powered by PCI-Express 2.0 x4 bus speeds. It's also the industry's first 4 port native SATA 6Gb/s RAID host adapter, which allows newer HDDs with SATA 6Gb/sec capabilities to operate at full-speed within systems that were built before this protocol was finalized.

The RocketRAID 640 series delivers up to 600MB/s of throughput per SATA port boosting storage performance for legacy systems, and backwards compatibility with SATA 1.5, 2.0 and 3.0 drives is promised. Unfortunately, gaining this compatibility will cost you, as the RocketRAID 640 is available $196.90 and for the RocketRAID 644 is priced at $240.90.

HighPoint Announces Industry’s 1st PCI-Express 2.0 x4 Native SATA 6Gb/s RAID Host Adapter

Milpitas, CA – Feb 15 2010, HighPoint Technologies is announcing the RocketRAID 640 series– the industry’s fastest SATA 6Gb/s RAID host adapters powered by PCI-Express 2.0 x4 bus speeds. The industry’s first 4 port native SATA 6Gb/s RAID host adapters allow users to upgrade to the fastest SATA hard drives and scale to higher storage capacities.

RocketRAID 640 Series Features
The RocketRAID 640 series is the newest edition to the RocketRAID SATA 6Gb/s host adapter portfolio. This series offers 4 independent SATA 6Gb/s ports for internal or external storage connectivity. A PCI-Express 2.0 x4 bus technology and is also backward compatible with PCI-Express 1.0 for legacy systems. HighPoint hardware assisted RAID 0, 1, 5, 10 and JBOD offers a balance of storage performance or protection.

Software support includes complete OS drivers and a user friendly RAID management and monitoring tool for popular OSes including Windows, Linux, and FreeBSD.

Turbo Charging Your System with SATA 6Gb/s

The RocketRAID 640 series delivers up to 600MB/s of throughput per SATA port boosting storage performance for legacy systems. Current systems can also maximize PCI-Express 2.0 x4 bandwidth to 2GB/s of throughput. Being backward compatible to all generations of SATA hard drives (3.0, 2.0 and 1.5) ensures that systems can smoothly transition to SATA 6Gb and fully utilize their existing cables and connectors.

Performance Companion for Speedy Devices

The highest performing SATA and SSD hard drives have performance bottlenecks due to older generation host adapters and bus technologies. The RocketRAID 640 series offers dedicated bandwidth and point-to-point connectivity making it the performance companion for speedy devices such as SATA 6Gb/s and SSD hard drives. A PCI-Express 2.0 x4 bus also provides the bandwidth needed to break through the performance barrier.

Growing Your Storage As You Need !

Four SATA 6Gb/s ports and support for port multiplier devices allows user to grow their storage capacities as needed. PM devices provide the most economical way to scale storage capacities. With the HighPoint RAID management utility, users can scale their storage capacities with OCE (Online Capacity Expansion) without losing their existing data investment to 20 SATA devices or up to 40TB of disk space.

Where to Buy

The RocketRAID 64x Series are available exclusively through channel distribution partners (Bell Micro, D and H, Malabs, and ASI).  MSRP for RocketRAID 640 is $196.90 and for the RocketRAID 644 is $240.90