PCI-Express 2.0 x4 Quad eSATA 6Gbs RAID launches for Mac Pro
updated 06:25 pm EDT, Fri May 14, 2010
Card delivers 600MB/sec on each channel
High Point has released its RocketRAID Quad eSATA 6Gbs host adapter. The new card is claimed to be the industry’s first PCI-Express 2.0 host adapter with four independent 6Gb/s eSATA connectors for the Mac. It supports RAID 0, 1, 5, 10 and JBOD configurations for performance or data protection.
RAID 0 uses striping to maintain speed, while RAID 1 simply mirrors volumes for redundancy. RAID 10 works as a hybrid, increasing performance without losing redundancy, while RAID 5 provides the redundancy of RAID 0 or RAID 10 but with higher storage capacity using four disks.
The device can deliver 600MB per second in bandwidth for each connection. The card works with 8x and 16x slots and is backward compatible to PCI-Express Gen 1.0 slots. It supports SATA 3.0 and 2.0.
RocketRAID Quad eSATA 6Gbs PCI-Express 2.0 card works with all Mac Pro machines, requiring Mac OS X 10.4 or higher. Company contact is required for pricing.
Dedicated MacNNer
Joined: Aug 2003
I must be missing something
What's the customer benefit to a 600MB per second channel when standard SATA drives can only transfer at 70MB per second? Can you daisy-chain multiple SATA drives on a single channel, a la SCSI? Theoretically this card is wide enough to support 34 7200RPM drives simultaneously-thats headroom for 8 drives per channel.