Highpoint has launched the RocketU 1144C HBA, which is the industry’s fastest USB 3.0 storage controller and offers a transfer bandwidth of 20 Gb/s via four dedicated 5 Gb/s controllers. The HBA features a PCI-E 2.0 x4 host interface and is advertised as “uniquely suited for high-speed USB 3.0 storage configurations” such as multi-drive bays, RAID enclosures and external SSDs.
The RocketU 1144C also includes full support for the USB Attached SCSI (UAS) protocol that can handle multiple data transfer requests simultaneously (unlike Bulk Only Transport’s queue system) which should offer better bandwidth utilization and lower CPU utilization.
The HighPoint RocketU 1144C is currently on sale for $109 with a one year manufacturer warranty and is compatible with Windows 7 / 8 / Server 2012 and Linux distributions that utilize the v2.6.31 kernel.