Back in November, HighPoint released the first SATA 3 6Gbps controller cards that add SATA 3 capability to existing computers. The company turned this up a notch Sunday by announcing the first SATA 3 6Gbps controller cards with built-in support for RAID configurations.
Apart from using the faster SATA 3 hard drive as a single drive, this means you now can now configure the device to offer still speedier performance or better data protection.
HighPoint's two new cards are the RocketRAID 620 for internal hard drives and the RocketRAID 622 for external hard drives. They're based on the second generation of PCI-Express interfaces and support a variety of RAID setups including 0, 1, 5, and 10. The cards also support JBOD, a non-RAID method for linking multiple hard drives.
HighPoint says the new cards have features such as hot-swappability and OCE/ORLM, which allows for migrating from one RAID level to another.
Performance-wise, HighPoint says its new controller cards provide dedicated bandwidth for point-to-point connectivity and are ideal for solid-state drives as well as SATA 6Gbps-based storage devices. The new cards are also backward-compatible with SATA 3Gbps and 1.5Gbps interfaces
With more SATA 3 hard drives coming out this year, these new controller cards are an economical way to up your computing performance without having to change the computer's motherboard--or get a new computer altogether.
The RocketRAID 620 and RocketRAID 622 controller cards will be available in a few days and will cost $80 and $90, respectively.