HighPoint PCIe Controller Cards for Intel’s Skylake Motherboards

For the past 20 years, HighPoint Technologies, Inc. has been a RAID storage and management solutions provider, striving to bring quality product to market and deliver price-performance value.

HighPoint RR600

While Skylake based motherboards deliver the performance demanded by today’s PC enthusiast and resource-hungry applications, these designs often sacrifice storage connectivity and expansion capability for raw speed and processing power. The company believes that customers should not have to trade storage connectivity for raw performance. The Rocket and RocketRAID Series PCIe controller cards represent versatile and affordable SAS and SATA storage expansion solutions, and are ideally suited for Intel Corp.‘s new Skylake motherboard platforms.

Understanding PCH limitations of Intel Skylake and 100 series chipset
Intel’s Skylake motherboards utilize NVMe technology to introduce next generation SSD’s to consumer and commercial platforms. NVMe SSD’s utilize the PCIe3.0 host interface, which provides more transfer bandwidth than conventional SAS/SATA interfaces. However, upon closer examination of Skylake motherboard specifications, the new design’s limitations become apparent; to truly take advantage of NVMe’s performance potential, you must sacrifice SATA port connectivity when using NVMe SSD’s.

Skylake utilizes high-speed input/output technology (HSIO) to provide more flexibility for device connectivity and expansion. The 100 Series chipset PCH utilizes the new DMI 3.0 Gen3 connection. Compared to DMI 2.0, the connection speed between the CPU and Chipset has increased by 40%; from 5GT/s (2GB/s) to 8GT/s (3.93GB/s). Although DMI 3.0 increases bandwidth, the number of available PCIe lanes is still insufficient for the multiple type of devices and PCIe expansion support customers expect and need from most motherboards. The diagram makes it clear that the 100 chipset series is actually a staggered option for PCIe SSD and SATA storage devices. Motherboards that utilize this design only provide 1 or 2 SATA ports when one PCIe x4 SSD is installed. However, without a PCIe SSD installed, all 6 SATA port are available to the user.

RocketRAID controllers: SATA storage solution for RAID and connectivity
Company’s PCIe SAS/SATA controller cards allow customers to overcome the storage expansion limitations of the Skylake platform. Rocket and RocketRAID HBA’s were designed to deliver versatile and comprehensive selection of port connectivity options; to 40 internal/external and hybrid SAS/SATA channels for RAID and JBOD configurations. HighPoint offers comprehensive software and driver support for all major OS platforms including Windows, Mac OS X, Linux and FreeBSD.

Each RocketRAID controller includes a user friendly RAID management solution, which allows customers to easily configure SAS or SATA storage devices for performance or mass storage capability. RocketRAID storage configurations are self-contained, and can operate independently and along size the IZ170’s integrated RST for PCIe M.2 SSDs.

HighPoint R750

Rocket and RocketRAID HBA solutions:

• AHCI compliance HBA solution: Rocket 600L Series

• Combined USB 3.0 port + eSATA port solution: RocketU 1144E

• Massive SATA port count solutions – Rocket 750, RocketRAID-274x, RocketRAID-2760A Series

• Cost efficient SATA RAID-5 solutions – RocketRAID-600L, RocketRAID-6xx, RocketRAID-272x Series

• Hardware RAID SATA / SAS solution – RocketRAID-4500 and RocketRAID-3600 Series