Leading motherboard makers often supply SSD expander adapters that can house two or four M.2 drives for those who want to run them in RAID for performance, capacity, and/or reliability/redundancy. However, M.2 drives don't provide enough storage capacity for modern servers and heavy-duty workstations, so HighPoint has introduced its new SSD RAID controller card that can house up to eight E1.S drives providing unbeatable capacity and performance. We are talking about tens of terabytes of storage at up to 55 GBps.
Speaking of performance, HighPoint says that when equipped with high-end E1.S drives, its SSD7749E E1.S RAID Controller Card can deliver throughput of up to 28 GB/s (which is likely the practical limitation of a PCIe Gen4 x16 interface with 128b/130b encoding overhead taken into account). Yet, when two SSD7749E E1.S RAID boards are installed into one system, they can work in Cross-Sync RAID configurations and deliver transfer bandwidth of up to 55 GB/s.
The E1.S form-factor is used by datacenter SSDs that are designed to support consistently high sequential and random performance. The rated 28 GBps and 55 GBps sequential read/write speeds are peak performance numbers achievable for a limited amount of time depending on the size of the SLC cache.
As for capacities, when equipped with eight 7.68TB E1.S SSDs, one SSD7749E E1.S RAID Controller Card will offer 61.44TB of usable capacity. Two of these boards will deliver 122.88TB of storage space.
HighPoint's SSD7749E E1.S RAID Controller Card is a rather massive two-wide add-in-card with two fans and a PCIe 4.0 x16 interface that can be installed into a 2U server or a desktop workstation. The SSD7749E AIC can house eight E.1S drives and is based around HighPoint's proprietary chip, which acts like a RAID controller and an intelligent PCIe switch to maximize the performance of the SSDs.
HighPoint's NVMe RAID controllers support RAID 0, 1, 10, arrays and single drives. In addition, they can handle a variety of mixed configurations of single-disks and arrays, multiple arrays, multiple bootable volumes, and boot + storage configurations.
The availability timeframe and pricing of the SSD7749E E1.S RAID Controller Card have not been announced.
