Features - Storage Innovations:

HighPoint INTROS 8-CHANNEL PCI-X TO SATA RAID 5 HOST ADAPTER

HighPoint Technologies Inc introduced its RocketRAID 1820A, the 8-channel PCI-X to Serial ATA (SATA) RAID 5 Low Profile Host Adapter with Linux and AMD64 support. HighPoint also announced full Tagged Command Queuing support, which has been tested and certified as compatible with Western Digital's WD Raptor 74GB SATA hard drives.

"The combination of performance, functionality and cost effectiveness offered by the RocketRAID 1820A will provide small to medium sized businesses an enterprise-class solution," said Michael Whang, CEO of HighPoint.

Extending storage IT budgets for system designers and end users; making sure that data is protected -- while remaining instantly accessible -- requires faster, smarter solutions. Tested with eight WD Raptor 74GB SATA drives with Dual Xeon 2.0 GHz CPU and a PCI-X motherboard, the RocketRAID 1820A performed RAID 5 sustained READS at 480MB per second and WRITES at 300MB per second. It supports all popular RAID levels including RAID 0, 1, 5, 10 and JBOD. The 64-bit, 133MHz PCI-X architecture supports total transfer rates of 1200MB per second. This solution provides a significant performance enhancement and it is ideal for RAID implementations. The maximum capacity that RocketRAID 1820A can support is more than 2TB. It is a replacement for SCSI in performance and capacity.

"HighPoint is an important industry player in our efforts to deliver innovative and cost-effective storage products to a market that demands the highest reliability and performance available for its IT budgets," said Richard E. Rutledge, vice president of marketing for Western Digital. "Using Serial ATA technology, HighPoint's RocketRAID 1820A and WD Raptor drives combine to deliver performance and functionality on par with SCSI products at significantly less cost to system builders and end users."

The RocketRAID 1820A offers the industry's only Eight Channel PCI-X to SATA RAID 5 solution for high performance computing environments. The bandwidth provided by PCI-X is ideal for industry standard servers running enterprise applications. Platforms that stand to gain the most from the RocketRAID 1820A are business servers, Web servers, NAS storage, data storage backup, security systems, and streaming applications for audio and video servers.