HighPoint SATA 6GB/s PCI-E Cards Announced

[Soultribunal]

It happens to everyone. You go out and buy yourself a brand new computer, or build it from scratch, then the next big thing is launched,which of course your new hardware doesn't support. Highpoint looks to solve this age old problem with their new Rocket 600, whichbrings SATA 6Gb/s to a computer near you.The next big craze to hit motherboard manuf... [ Read full article ]

[gingerbee]

interesting

[MpG]

Like with any new tech, I suppose it's a chicken and egg scenario, but this sort of thing will be a hard sell until drives are able to actually use the speed. Nevermind the logistics of trying to push PCI-E 2.0 x1 bandwidth through the DMI on some chipsets. They really shot themselves in the foot when SATA 6.0 didn't hit the shelves with P55.

[FiXT]

A few of the reviewers have been discussing the benefit of this card internally and thus we amended the original news article.

Here are the facts:
Our esteemed SSD Guru, AkG has pointed out that the limitation of PCIe 2.0 1x is 500MB/s (4Gb/s).

He also pointed out that many high end SSD's are closing in on the existing 3Gb/s transfer speed offered by SATA2 - hence the move to SATA3.


This card has two ports, at 6Gb/s - but the bandwidth limitation of the PCIe slot means, that with both ports filled, your devices are only going to be able to utilize 2Gb/s... this this card may actually hurt the performance of even a midrange dual configuration, and is a really poor solution for a single high end storage device. It is definitely not future proof as we move into faster SSD devices on a near daily basis.

That said, it is one of the few products to support SATA3 devices which may be handy if mechanical drives ever get around to adopting it and it isn't a terrible solution for a single driver solution maxing current SATA2

I believe the deduction above is correct - if wrong obviously feel free to correct me

[gingerbee]

i was thinking that was going to be a problem

[ayah]

Someone needs to make a 12 port 6Gb/s SATA hardware raid controller in a PCI-E x8 or 16 slot.