Highpoint put its best consumer foot forward at CES. The company showed PCI Express cards for USB 3.0 ports and also showed a plug-in card that allows four SATA devices to work together with caching SSDs.
The RocketRaid 2720 is a PCI Express x4 plug-in card with a single SAS output. A special SATA cable with four SATA connectors can control as many SATA-600 devices. A user can configure any combination they want, but thanks to the caching feature of the 2720, a combination of SSDs and hard drives is the most interesting. In this way, SSD performance must be combined with the storage capacity of a hard drive. An interesting detail about the card is the RAID support on the SSDs: for example, several small SSDs can be used to optimize the caching performance.
For systems without USB 3.0 connectivity, Highpoint showed its new RocketRaidU 1142 cards. These PCI Express plug-in cards feature a USB controller for each port to ensure maximum throughput. The A version has two external USB 3.0 ports, while the AM version also has an internal header. The latter comes with a case front panel breakout box and a RocketStar, while the former comes with a RocketStar only. The RocketStar is an external dock for two 3.5″ or 2.5″ drives that can be addressed in raid.