HighPoint Unveils SATA 6 Gb/s Expander Module

News
By Tarun Iyer
published

The HighPoint Rocket EJ340 is advertised as ideal for applications that demand cost-effective, high-capacity 6 Gb/s storage configurations.

HighPoint Technologies has launched the Rocket EJ340, the industry’s first SATA 6 Gb/s Expander Module with a built-in enclosure management. The EJ340 utilizes industry standard mini-SAS connectors, a Centronics compliant form factor and allows the company’s RocketRAID series HBAs to support up to 16 SATA hard drives through a single connector and offer 400% more storage capacity and scalable performance.

As you might expect, the device supports a wide-range of storage configurations including JBOD, RAID 0, RAID 10 and RAID 50 and includes support for advanced features such as Online Capacity Expansion (OCE) and Online RAID Level Migration (ORLE), which allow "clients to expand, upgrade or convert RAID existing configurations as needed without compromising data."

The Rocket EJ340 also includes featured integrated temperature sensors with connectors for an additional two sensors, an audible alarm, LED pins for enclosure monitoring, three ports for temperature sensitive automated fans and an "intuitive web-based interface" for real-time monitoring.

The Rocket EJ340 SATA 6 Gb/s expander module is currently on sale for $119 and supports all major operating systems including Windows Server 2003 – 2012, Windows 8, numerous Linux distributions, FreeBSD and Mac OS X.

Tarun Iyer
4 Comments Comment from the forums
  • dgingeri
    you get what you pay for. Server level expanders use all four channels at once, expanding to 12 or 16 channels. With this, you'd be narrowing down 4 drives worth of bandwidth into a single channel. Performance would suck eggs. Oh, sure, you'd get more drives to work with, but the performance would be far less than it could be.
    Reply
  • WyomingKnott
    Let's see. 16 drives is 400% more than something. So something = 16 / 5 = 3.2.

    Previous generation hardware supported 3.2 drives? Or has the nonsense introduced into our language by innumerate and practically illiterate ad writers spread to people who can actually count? It's 400% as much, or 300% more, or even four times as much if you are writing for people who understand numbers. I'm going to assume that this was taken from the mfg's copy, not written at Tom's.
    Reply
  • tehconz
    WyomingKnott's comment was 6 months ago now, but it's so stupid I feel compelled to respond anyway. Without the expander you can connect 4 drives to a port. With the expander in place you can connect 16. 16 is 400% more than 4. Why on earth he's dividing by 5 to get 3.2 is anyone’s guess.
    Reply
  • WyomingKnott
    I'll take that challenge. 16 is 300% more than 4, not 400% more. 12 is 200% more than 4. 8 is 100% more than 4. 4 is 0% more than 4.

    If you stick with the ridiculous idea that 16, which is 400% as much as 4, should be called 400% more than 4, then 4 is 100% "more than" 4. And 4 is not more than 4.

    For some reason, "more than" is being used instead of "as much as" in common writing, introduced by dishonest advertising. However, it's not like other changes in the language which can happen over time, because it is wrong and leads to ridiculous contradictions as above.

    Got it? Or did you miss the error in the original post that I was referring to: "The EJ340 utilizes industry standard mini-SAS connectors, a Centronics compliant form factor and allows the company’s RocketRAID series HBAs to support up to 16 SATA hard drives through a single connector and offer 400% more storage capacity and scalable performance."
    Reply