HighPoint SSD7101 Series SSD Review
Conclusion
Most people won't buy the HighPoint SSD7101A-1 just for the fun of it. These are serious workstation-focused products that require a specific workload to extract the most value. HighPoint has delivered a product with broad compatibility, and you aren’t tied down to a single SSD brand, either.
But there are a select few that would buy the $399 SSD7101A-1 just for the fun of it. I think I know all of those people! For most of our audience, NVMe all but killed RAID. Coalescing SATA SSDs in RAID still delivered a sequential performance increase that improved application performance, but NVMe ushered in a new era where the processor and software became the bottleneck again. If you're an enthusiast and your only motivation is performance, this is just an expensive option that may leave you dissatisfied.
If you seek high-performance capacity for a large game library, pairing the SSD7101A-1 with low-cost drives would fit the bill. You won't experience a severe performance penalty, but your wallet will certainly be a lot lighter.
Professional users know all too well that CPUs and GPUs get faster every year. The HighPoint SSD7101 series is faster than any of the hardware I have in the lab to crunch data. We ran a Vegas Pro (formally Sony Vegas) test with the SSD7101 and a handful of the other drives. The test consists of several effects and video streams. Sony built the test, which essentially creates a broadcast-quality commercial. We see an enormous difference in rendering times between hard disk drives and SATA SSDs. With most NVMe SSDs there isn't a difference at all because the storage isn't the bottleneck. We're looking at building an updated test using 4K resolution clips for future tests. The increased resolution may put more strain on the storage system.
This means the bar is very high to take advantage of the SSD7101's performance. If you can fathom where that bar is, we would like to know. It would be great to build a new test that benefits from four of the fastest consumer SSDs ever released. In a way, that sums up the HighPoint SSD7101 series. It comes packing so much sequential performance we don't even know what to do with it.
You’ll need a very specific workload to get the most out of the HighPoint SSD7101A-1 models. These are professional products designed for serious work, but we like the bare model for the DIY crowd because you can fill the adapter with low-cost SSDs.
HighPoint SSD7101B (4TB)
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http://www.sgidepot.co.uk/onyx2/groupstation.pdf
More realistically, this product is ideal for GIS, medical, automotive and other application areas that involve huge datasets (including defense imaging), though the storage capacity still isn't high enough in some cases, but it's getting there.
I do wonder about the lack of power loss protection though, seems like a bit of an oversight for a product that otherwise ought to appeal to pro users.
Ian.
This is not a Raid controller. it uses software raid. the PLX chip on it allows the system to "think" that the x16 slot is a 4 independent x4 slots thats all , and all active and bootable. thats all. The rest is software.
there is a U2 Version of this card , using it with built in power loss U2 nvme SSD will solve this problem.
link
http://www.highpoint-tech.com/USA_new/series-ssd7120-overview.htm
The fact alone that such a pro product landed in the consumer arena, even if it is for a very selective category of consumers, is nothing small of an achievement.
The explanation of how the M.2 traffic is routed through the DMI bus was very clear. I wonder if there is even a single motherboard that will route that traffic directly to the CPU. Anyone knows about such a motherboard ?
Cheers
All motherboards have slots directed to the CPU lanes. for example , most Z series come with 2 slots SLI 8 lanes each. you can use one of them for GPU and the other for any card and so on.
If the CPU has more than 16 lanes you will have more slots connected to the CPU lanes like the X299 motherboards.
If your board does, you can skip the cost and go for a Dell or HP card. ITs does not have PLX chip. Its a very simple card. 16 lanes of PCIE, 4 lanes to each SSD and its cheap.
http://barefeats.com/hard210.html
5GB/s way back in 2015......its pcie 2.0 and achi though.
amfeltec one. Its low profile but no heatsink for the SSDs.
sorry it is a new product .. it is NVME and were waiting for NVME . and it is NVME and Bootable as well .
Because I dont wish to waste PCIe slots that way, especially when those boards already come with 3 M.2 ports.
1. You're not "wasting" a slot that is unused. If you have a full-size ATX mb the vast majority of users won't have a need for all the slots. If you want maximum M.2 performance, you just found a need for them.
2. An M.2 slot on the motherboard with poor performance is not categorically different than trying to connect a fast SSD through the motherboard's USB ports, or plugging an x16 graphics card into an x1 slot. Just don't do it if you care about performance.
This generation of motherboards just doesn't have fast M.2 on-board slots, so forget about them. Pretend they aren't even there. You seem to be hung up on the idea of having your cake and eating it too with a currently available mb with full-speed x4 direct to CPU M.2 slots. You can keep wishing they are plentiful, but it isn't going to solve your problem. Either wait until the next generation of mb's -- maybe X399 ones will have them? -- or go with the solution that is at hand today. Or suffer with substandard M.2 on-board perf. There is no fourth option, unless it is to whine about the state of affairs and do nothing.
If it's not used today it doesn't mean it will still be unused tomorrow. And too bad I'm not part of that "vast majority of users".
I strongly doubt that the fastest SSD on USB will be as fast as the slowest M.2 SSD. And btw, one reason I read THW is to make sure to buy not that poor performer hardware.
Oh really ? What would it need to be a "fast M.2" slot ? Are you dreaming of some magic super shortcut that would make them even faster ? Why would them be not fast since they are directly linked to the CPU just like the PCIe slots ?
I've been doing that a lot recently with X79 setups, typically with cheaper SM951/SM961 drives (excellent cache/scratch drives for editing, etc.), but also 950 Pro or whatever for boot (there are a great many older ASUS boards for which modded BIOS files with NVMe boot support is now available). I bought a 1TB SM961 for my Z68/2700K setup, works very well.
There's one other advantage of using M.2 adapters in this way: for older mbds with limited native Intel SATA3 ports, it frees them up for more targeted use, in my case a port is linked to a front-bay hot swap so I can do live C-drive backups or access other drives for whatever reason (3rd party SATA3 controllers generally suck).
A caveat though, albeit perhaps a minor issue: on some older mbds with lots of PCIe slots (mainly X58 and X79), some slots are routed via PCIe switches, which can add a little bit of latency. There's usually at least one x4 or x8 slot though which goes straight to the CPU, as can been seen for example in the following diagram of the ASUS P9X79-E WS (in a 4960X system I recently built, the directly connected x8 slot holds a 512GB SM961, which belts along at almost 3.5GB/sec):
https://images.anandtech.com/doci/7613/Chipset%20Diagram.png
In this case, as mikenth says, one can have several GPUs aswell as a crazy fast NVMe as boot or some other purpose. My 4960X system has an SM951 256GB for the C-drive (only cost 65 UKP) and two 780 Ti GPUs for CUDA which both run at x16.
There's even a P55 board one can do something like this with (not quite to the same extent, but still surprisingly potent), namely the ASUS P7P55 WS Supercomputer, which via two PLX switches supports x8/x8/x8/x8. I have two of these P7P55 WS boards, great for CUDA crunching; I used one of them with three 980s SLI to bag all of the 3DMark P55 records (except for the DX12/VR stuff, as I'm only using WIn7).
There's a lot of life in older tech where one has plenty of PCIe lanes/slots to throw around. I have an Asrock X58 Extreme6 I plan on experimenting with at some point, not gotten round to it yet.
Oh and btw, X79 boards usually support the dirt cheap 10-core XEON E5-2680 v2 (mine cost 165 UKP), a great way to get native PCIe 3.0 and a good performer for threaded tasks (scores 15.45 for CB 11.5 and 1389 for CB R15).
This of course is why Intel and mbd vendors do not want older products to support bootable NVMe, it would extent their life, which means fewer people upgrading. Thank grud for BIOS mods.
Lastly, the 950 Pro is a wonderful drive because it has its own boot ROM, so it can be used even on older mbds that cannot be flashed with a modded BIOS for bootable NVMe.
Ian.
Thank you for all these details. Looks like you are crazy geeks with plenty of time to spare.
With your examples I got a better insight on our colleague's mikenth previous comment.
I know there is a lot of potential in older quality hardware and not only I personally try to squeeze the maximum performance for my needs from it but I also encourage everyone to do so and the more I read about the security flaws in IME, IPMI or backdoors in cars crap the longer I wish to keep my older hardware.