HighPoint Technologies has updated its NVMe RAID solutions with PCIe 4.0 support and adapter cards that support up to eight NVMe drives. The new HighPoint SSD7500 series “adapter cards” are the PCIe 4.0 successors to the SSD7100 and SSD7200 series products. These cards are primarily aimed at the workstation market, as the server market has largely moved on from traditional RAID arrays, especially when using NVMe SSDs for which there are no traditional “hardware RAID controllers”. HighPoint’s PCIe gen4 line currently consists of cards with four or eight M.2 slots and one with eight SFF-8654 ports for connecting to U.2 SSDs. They also recently added an 8x M.2 card to the PCIe gen3 family, with the Mac Pro being the lead of a popular workstation platform that won’t be getting PCIe gen4 support anytime soon.
HighPoint's NVMe RAID is implemented as software RAID in conjunction with adapter cards featuring Broadcom/PLX PCIe switches. HighPoint provides RAID drivers and management utilities for Windows, macOS , and Linux. Highpoint's recent 4-drive cards include the UEFI driver in an Option ROM to provide boot support for Windows and Linux systems, and all of their cards allow booting from SSDs that are not part of a RAID array.
HighPoint Technologies has also improved the cooling on the RAID cards. The newer design allows the cards to benefit from airflow provided by the case fans instead of the card (two fans, for the 8x M.2 cards), and the fans they now use are a bit larger and quieter.
In the table below you can also see the prices of the products.
The SSD7140 (8x M.2, PCIe gen3) and SSD7505 (4x M.2, PCIe gen4) have already been released, and the SSD7540 (8x M.2, PCIe gen4) is launching this month. The SSD7580 (8x U.2, PCIe gen4) will be available next month.
