HighPoint Technologies has launched their Smart Hybrid HBA’s product line, designed to merge SSDs and hard drives into a single high-speed storage solution. The PCI-E 2.0, SATA 6Gb/s HBAs are powered by the Marvell 88SE9130 controller and deliver 80% of the SSD’s performance and 100% of the hard drive’s capacity.
HighPoint Technologies has launched their Smart Hybrid HBA’s product line, designed to merge SSDs and hard drives into a single high-speed storage solution. The PCI-E 2.0, SATA 6Gb/s HBAs are powered by the Marvell 88SE9130 controller and deliver 80% of the SSD’s performance and 100% of the hard drive’s capacity.
HighPoint’s RocketHybrid HBA’s combine the SSD and hard drive into a single storage device know as a HyperDuo virtual drive. While this concept might sound familiar, the RocketHybrid product allows for various levels of customization using a software layer to manage the SSD/HDD use. Two types of virtual drives are available. Safe Mode mirrors all data to the HDD for security and Capacity Mode optimizes the Hybrid Drive for rapid file access.
Capacity Mode is the more interesting mode. Users see a single drive letter and via the magic of firmware and software, hot files (popular) are designated and stored on the SSD for rapid access, while cold files (less popular) reside exclusively on the hard drive. In this manner, the SSD is seen like a high-speed cache for the hard drive rather than an distinct drive. The Highpoint software scans the drives on a regular schedule to re-work the hot files list to make sure the SSD is always current.
Advanced users can also customize their Hybrid Drive, and manually select files for optimization using the interface below.
There are two versions of the RocketHybrid card, the 1220 and 1222. The 1220 provides two internal SATA ports for standard PC’s, and the RocketHybrid 1222 provides two eSATA ports for use with external disks.
Pricing and Availability
HighPoint’s RocketHybrid HBA’s both have an MSRP of $59.99 and will be available later this month.
