Tuesday, October 27th 2009
HighPoint Announces Availability of First SATA 6 Gb/s Host Adapter Based on PCI-E 2.0
HighPoint Technologies - an industry pioneer of innovative SATA and SAS RAID host adapter manufacturing, today unleashes the Rocket 600 series - the industry's first SATA 6 Gb/s host adapter based on PCI-Express 2.0 technology. The Rocket 600 series delivers the next generation of SATA performance with robust SATA connectivity and will be available at the beginning of November 2009.
The Rocket 600 series brings a new level of cost effective pricing and will help drive mass adoption to the next generation of SATA 6 Gb/s technology. They are fully industry standard AHCI (Advanced Host Controller Interface) compliant and deliver Out-of-Box Ready installation for the majority of operating systems. The Rocket 600 series are backward compatible to PCI-Express 1.0 technology and (SATA 3 Gb/s & 1.5 Gb/s) devices. They use the same cable and connectors as previous SATA generations to ease integration.
Pricing and Availability: The MSRP for the Rocket 620 Series is $69.99 and the Rocket 622 $79.99 and will be available at end of October 2009. All HighPoint RocketRAID products are available through channel distribution partners (Bell Micro, D and H, MaLabs and ASI).
The Rocket 600 series brings a new level of cost effective pricing and will help drive mass adoption to the next generation of SATA 6 Gb/s technology. They are fully industry standard AHCI (Advanced Host Controller Interface) compliant and deliver Out-of-Box Ready installation for the majority of operating systems. The Rocket 600 series are backward compatible to PCI-Express 1.0 technology and (SATA 3 Gb/s & 1.5 Gb/s) devices. They use the same cable and connectors as previous SATA generations to ease integration.
40 Comments on HighPoint Announces Availability of First SATA 6 Gb/s Host Adapter Based on PCI-E 2.0
btw PCIe x1 card work fine in x4/x8/x16 slots
Still have no idea why youd want 6Gb/s on a raid controller with only 2 ports though
and you do know that graphics cards do go down to pcie 1.0 slot to? :p
surely this is more for larger raid cards in server setups where they using multiple hardrives and pushing a lot of data... not just 2 sata drives
It is 6Gb/s per port. Just like a SATA 3.0Gb/s is 3.0Gb/s per port. The 6.0Gb/s is not shared between all the ports, each port gets its own 6.0Gb/s. This card for instance gives 12Gb/s total, due to having two ports at 6.0Gb/s each.
Now as for what drives use this type of speed. None, yet. However, SSDs are already starting to nearly max out SATA 3.0Gb/s ports. So something better than 3.0Gb/s will be required in the near future, hence 6.0Gb/s is hitting the market.
And before it is even said, yes even a PCI-E 2.0 x1 slot would end up being the bottleneck for this card, the slot would only provide about 5.0Gb/s shared by both drives. IMO, a SATA 6.0Gb/s card should have at least a PCI-E 2.0 x4 slot to eliminate the bottleneck from the PCI-E slot.
However, we are probably only months away from seeing SSDs that will see a difference on this controller(or any 6.0Gb/s controller) compared to a 3.0Gb/s controller.
Right now all 6.0Gb/s controllers are useless, as they provide nothing over a 3.0Gb/s controller, even with SSDs. However, there seems to be a new faster SSD released almost daily, so it will not be long before we see SSDs that need a 6.0Gb/s controller to achieve their maximum performance. Buying a 6.0Gb/s controller is a future proofing move by people that use SSDs, and must have the fastest one on the market.
If you just plan to hook hard drives up to it, this isn't the controller for you.
And while buying a board with a 6.0Gb/s controller onboard would be nice, it kind of limits what boards you can buy(to one $260 P55 board currently). Leaving all the AMD and 775/1366 users in the dark.
And the same argument can be made with SATA 3.0GB/s card, but even more so since pretty much every board sold today has built in SATA 3.0Gb/s ports. Doesn't stop the add-in SATA controller manufacturers from selling tons of dedicated SATA 3.0Gb/s cards. for using a single drive, I'll use onboard without hesitation, but for doing RAID, I'd take a dedicated card over an onboard anyday.
Cable clutter is a non-issue unless you are one that absolutely can't stand the site of a cable anywhere in your case. The extra 2 inches of cable showing by moving the SATA port from the edge of the board to the PCI-E slot probably won't even be noticeable, especially if you use black SATA cables.
I suppose it keeps us in practice and ready for when SATA 12Gb starts to show ;)
www.highpoint-tech.com/USA/r620.htm
www.highpoint-tech.com/USA/r622.htm
There is no mention of RAID support (hence the name "Rocket" instead of "RocketRAID").