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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.
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