Highpoint Rocket 750 - 40 Port PCI-E 2.0 x8 HBA

[Thatguy]

Here's the PR on xbitlabs.com

HighPoint Launches 40-Port Serial ATA-6Gb/s Controller Card - X-bit labs

Looks interesting, However theoretical per drive bandwidth in a perfect world is about 100MB/s.

I've had some Highpoint 2320's in the past, and was less than impressed with them. I'm also leery of their driver support for various OS's as I seem to recall them being binary blobs in the past.

However planned pricing is $739, which isn't bad.

</editorial>

 

[mobilenvidia]

40 ports wow, I take it controller with expander built in.
40x spindles would go nicely on this with 100MB/s each

check our the LED headers, my sausage fingers would not like hooking 40 sets up.

 

[Thatguy]

Oh, and the card is full height.

Anyone know of any 40 Drive chassis' that support full height cards?

Silly highpoint.

 

[mobilenvidia]

At closer look, not so good anymore, other than 40 ports you will struggle to use in an enclosure.

Marvell 88SE9485 = 8 port SATA controller
So the 4x square ICs I can see are SATA bridges/expanders to add 32x more ports
Latency will be high.

Only real use is a gazillion drives on a single controller.
160TB on a single controller but 4GB/s max on a good day with downhill cabling and fans forcing air same direction as electrons

RocketRAID 2700 series might be a better option with max 24i/8e ports on a PCIe 16x interface and I think 4x Marvel9485 controllers

 

[odditory]

I knew this thing was trouble within 5 seconds of scanning the PCB, and knowing what I know about Highpoint & Marvell's respective track records.

Poor throughput also confirmed by their marketing-speak that basically de-emphasizes it in a nice way: ""The PCIe 2.0 x8 host interface and 6 Gb/s SATA controller hardware deliver the ideal transfer bandwidth for applications focused on maximizing available storage capacity"

Heh.

 

[OBasel]

Scariest thing is trusting up to 160TB with Highpoint! Seems like they are the inexpensive option but tend to fall behind in performance and reliability. 40 4TB disks = $8,000 of drives. Might as well spend $200-300 more for a better solution.

 

[Lost-Benji]

Full height is the only option unless they go a sandwich option. Anyone with a case big enough to hold 40+ drives is likely know how to use PCI-E risers and lay the card over. The card is likely to be used with DAS as well.

Now, as for HighPoint (LowPoint more like it), I have been burnt with the shit before. They don't pass drives through natively (added layers in the way) and Marvel are not known for being marvelous. I would suggest using decent HBA's or ROC cards and expanders, true performance and scaling.

 

[mrkrad]

you can score P800's (25 watt) for cheap nowadays. They have the PMC 16port expander and 2 more battery spots plus SAAP 1.0 key and 2 external connectors, otherwise its just a P400[lsi 1078e] . $50 would be a good target price with dead batteries.

Heck I got a P812 for $199 with 1gb FBWC and SAAP 1.0 - PMC 24 port expander with PMC chipset, 4 external ports, 2 internal. It does eat 29 watts like the P822, but its damn reliable if you need to hook up a bunch of jbod and internal drives and supports dual-domain which i think is what LSI and Microsoft are now calling clustering?