The new SATA 6Gb/s interface is starting to get a good grip on the market, though there aren’t any real performance benefits when it comes to mechanical hard drives, the solid state drives are much more grateful. Using the new SATA 6GB/s interface, HighPoint Technologies has launched a new RAID controller card for more demanding storage systems, supporting both SAS and SATA 6Gb/s. The HighPoint RocketRAID 2720 utilizes a PCIe x8 expansion port and is able to handle up to a total of eight drives at the same time.
Through the PCI Express 2.0 standard, the card has a total bandwidth of 4GB/s, which should be enough even for fairly large RAID setups. The card also supports RAID configurations such as RAID 0, 1, 5, 10, 50 and JBOD.
With Smart Connectivity the RocketRAID 2720 has the flexibility to support either 15,000 RPM SAS and SSDs hard drives for performance and low cost SATA hard drives for capacity. The RocketRAID 2720 retains backward compatibility for SAS (3Gb/s) and for all generations of SATA (6Gb/s, 3Gb/s and 1.5Gb/s) hard drives.
The HighPoint RocketRAID 2720 is expected to cost somewhere around $329.
