RocketRAID SATA cards ship for PCIe Macs
updated 09:50 pm EST, Wed December 14, 2005
RocketRAID PCIe cards ship
HighPoint Technologies today announced that its RocketRAID controller cards are now shipping. The high-speed multi-channel SATA controllers offer multiple SATA II ports and support for multiple platforms which include Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows, BSD, and Linux. HighPoint currently offers its models, as well as its X4 external storage solution. Highpoint designed its controllers to meet the needs of both high end workstation and enterprise storage server environments as well as entry-level storage servers commonly found in small to medium size business IT environments (pricing was unavailable). [updated]
The RocketRAID 2320 PCI-Express controller boasts eight SATA II ports offering throughput at up to 300MB/second, as well as support for RAID 0, 1, 5, 10, and JBOD--"just a bunch of disks," or the ability to combine multiple disks into a single volume. The card also harbors HighPoint's RAID features, namely "Online Capacity Expansion," "Online RAID Level Migration" (OCE/ORLM), and the company's RAID Management software.
The RocketRAID 2240 RAID controller offers an Infiniband connection that is a highly reliable locking cable connector combining four SATA ports into one on the controller side, as well as support for RAID 0, 1, 5, 10, and JBOD. The card features Native Command Queuing (NCQ), staggered driver spin-up, and SAF-TE enclosure management support. The RR2240 supports up to 16 SATA I or SATA II hard drives, and can achieve speeds of up to 300MB/second.
The RocketRAID 2224 is a high performance PCI-X to SATA II host bus adapter (HBA), with support for hot-swap and hot-spare. Four internal ports combine SATA with the HBA's RAID features, as seen with the RocketRAID 2320 controller.
The RocketRAID 2220 offers much of the same functionality as HighPoint's RocketRAID 2224 HBA, but offers eight SATA ports rather than four. The RocketRAID 2220 supports advanced RAID levels 0, 1, 5, 10 and JBOD, plus the stable RAID 5 capability combined with HotSwap and HotSpare drives offers 24-hour fault tolerance.
