HighPoint Aggressively Pursuing Consumer Market ~ Computer Hardware Mall

Saturday, January 14, 2012

HighPoint Technologies is going to be a pretty familiar name to users who have heard of their RocketRAID expansion cards, but at CES their booth was surprisingly devoid of enterprise-level RAID kit. Instead we were presented with a fairly aggressive set of consumer class technologies.

That said, probably their biggest product was a new RocketRAID card that includes SSD smart caching technology similar to what ASUS provides as well as the technology in Intel's Z68 chipset. Where the card and technology deviate is impressive, though: HighPoint's card is essentially able to apply an underlying RAID both to the cache and the storage. As a result, you can strap two or three small SSDs to the card and aggregate the bandwidth by striping the cache across them. The card is also able to support multiple storage drives and mirror them. The unit on display used a single Mini-SAS connector to spider out to four SATA 6Gbps connectors. It's compelling stuff.

Less compelling but still interesting, HighPoint is also offering a line of USB 3.0 cards and accessories. Some of the cards use PCIe x4 instead of PCIe x1, allowing the USB 3.0 ports to achieve their full rated 5Gbps of bandwidth as opposed to being limited by host bandwidth.

There are also going to be RocketStor USB 3.0 drive docks, one of which actually supports RAID; the HighPoint rep we spoke to said they had been hesitant to enter into these markets while limited to USB 2.0's bandwidth, but with USB 3.0 it's no longer an issue.

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Saturday, January 14, 2012