HighPoint Technologies, a storage solutions manufacturer, said Thursday that it had begun shipments of its cost-efficient SAS-6Gb/s HBA, the RocketRAID 2711. The device is the first-in-the-industry controller with support up to four serial attached SCSI (SAS) hard drives that costs $179.

The HighPoint RockerRAID 2711 controller is an external 4-port, SAS 6Gb/s PCI Express 2.0 x8 RAID controller that directly supports up to 4 SAS/SATA devices in a variety of storage configurations. The device is specifically designed for workstations and entry-level servers. The controller fully supports external mini-SAS port (SFF-8088), which simplifies installation procedures of external hard disk drives (if there are any in the case of SAS and there is such a need).

The RocketRAID 2711 can support SAS and SATA devices in a multitude of configurations, including non-RAID JBOD’s, single disks, and RAID arrays including 0, 1, 5, 10 and 50, and includes Highpoint’s Unified Web-Based Management interface, which allows both novices and experts to quickly configure, manage and monitor storage configurations.

According to HighPoint, the RocketRAID 2711 delivers enterprise management and connectivity features at entry level costs.

The RocketRAID 2711 is fully backwards compatible with SAS/SATA 3Gb/s devices, PCI-Express 1.0 motherboards, and can be easily integrated into existing storage infrastructure, the manufacturer said.

The RocketRAID 2711 is compliant with all major operating systems including Windows, Mac OS X, Linux and FreeBSD. 

The RocketRAID 2711 is available immediately for MSRP of $179 from a world-wide network of distribution and reseller channels.

Tags: HighPoint, SAS, HDD