Highpoint Announces SATA 6Gb/s RAID Adapter

By Marcus Yam
published

Rock it, RAID.

Looking for SATA 6Gb/s but prefer your drives in a RAID configuration? HighPoint Technologies claims to be the first out of the gate with its RocketRAID 620 Series - a SATA 3.0 host adapters with RAID 5 capability and backwards compatibility with SATA 3Gb/s and 1.5Gb/s.

These RAID host adapters are based on PCI-Express Gen 2 host interface technology and are designed to optimize storage performance and redundancy with RAID 0, 1, 5, 10 and JBOD. User-friendly features include hot plug and hot unplug to add or remove storage devices; and OCE/ORLM to expand storage capacities or migrate to different RAID levels.

The two members of the RocketRAID 620 Series – RocketRAID 620 (MSRP $69.99) and RocketRAID 622 (MSRP $79.99) will ship mid January 2010.  

Marcus Yam
Marcus Yam
Marcus Yam served as Tom's Hardware News Director during 2008-2014. He entered tech media in the late 90s and fondly remembers the days when an overclocked Celeron 300A and Voodoo2 SLI comprised a gaming rig with the ultimate street cred.
16 Comments Comment from the forums
  • volks1470
    hmm...price isn't too shabby. (I don't think so at least) I was expecting a lot more.
    Reply
  • HavoCnMe
    Most mobo's have built in RAID controller's, but im sure this takes the performance to the next level, plus its SATA 3.0 6Gb/s capable. So let the flood begin with storage companies releasing their products. So we have something to hookup to this card.
    Reply
  • huron
    The pricing looks OK, but am I correct in seeing only 2 SATA ports?

    If you were looking at SATA 6Gb/s, wouldn't the only items that could saturate SATA 3GB/s be SSDs - someone would have to want these in a RAID, I guess, to take full advantage.
    Reply
  • eronquillo
    It be nice to see if SATA 3.0 hardware RAID cards come out soon.
    Reply
  • Zenthar
    huronThe pricing looks OK, but am I correct in seeing only 2 SATA ports?Must be more than that or else RAID 5 and 10 would be impossible ...
    Reply
  • JohnnyLucky
    What would be the practical benefit for mainstream applications? Would any performance boost be cost effective?
    Reply
  • jludvig
    The cards only have two sata ports, more drives can be connected through port multipliers (with reduced performance). Without any dedicated memory, and on a PCI-Express x1 interface, I doubt it'll be a world of performance. Just think about it: SATA 3.0 is 750MB / sec and the interface allows only 500MB / sec - this won't be the card to run something like the next generation of SSD's in RAID 0 - I guess it's targeted at the impatient, who need to be able to put "2 SATA3.0 drives in raid 0" in their forum signatures :-)
    Reply
  • Camikazi
    ZentharMust be more than that or else RAID 5 and 10 would be impossible ...HighPoint site says the 620 is 2 internal ports 622 2 eSATA ports, nothing else.
    Reply
  • climber
    go for the LSI logic SAS/SATA MegaRAID 6Gb/s controller, Toms did a review and it got 3.4 GB/s read speed. The 8 port model is affordable for power users, animators, CAD professionals, GIS specialists or hard cord gamers looking to have reduced load times. But if you want speed ups, use a RAMDISK for your Pagefile or selective application based temp directories.
    Reply
  • zdzichu
    Haven't you heard about SATA port multiplexers?
    Reply