HighPoint rSSD7101 NVMe Drive Now Available With up to 8TB

HighPoint continues to expand their impressive line of NVMe storage solution and this time it is the rSSD7101 series that gets an upgrade. These stand-alone RAID solutions can be easily installed into any compact workstation or server which has a free PCIe slot. And with it, you get 20 times the performance of a SATA SSD. Not only do these drives deliver up to 13,500MB/s, they also offer up to 8TB capacity.

Take Your Performance to the Next Level

HighPoint has two version of the rSSD7101, an Enthusiast version and a Professional version. The two drives variate in which drives are installed and thereby the performance. With the E-series, you get a read performance from 6800MB/s to 13000MB/s and a write performance of 3000MB/s to 7500MB/s. The P-series starts out with the same read performance, but it goes up to 13500MB/s after that. The write performance starts at 4000MB/s and goes up to 8000MB/s. Weirdly enough, HighPoint didn’t release any random IOPS figures. Those would have been interesting to know.

Endurance and Warranty wise there is a small difference too. You get a 3-year warranty and a 100 to 400TBW endurance rating on the E-series while the P-series has a 5-year warranty and 400 to 1200TBW. There’s also a difference when it comes to the available capacities. For E, we have 500GB to 4TB while the P-series starts at 1TB and ends at 8TB.

Dedicated Controller Beats Onboard Any Day

Your onboard M.2 NVMe slots offer PCIe 3.0 x4 speeds, but they share the bandwidth with other parts. SATA drives and USB ports use the same PCIe bandwidth and all that is sent through the Intel PCH before it reaches the CPU. A dedicated controller has a direct connection to the CPU with x16 speed. That’s a full 4x per drive for a maximum performance. It is in fact up to eight times as fast as an onboard solution, but it depends on the setup how big an impact it has.

Cooling

Four M.2 NVMe drives installed in a RAID setup, that’s something that’s going to create some heat. Luckily that’s no problem as the add-in card features an active cooling solution. It is built with an aluminium fin-channel cooling solution where each installed drive has its own heatsink and so does the RAID controller. Fresh air is then provided by a 50mm blower-type fan.

Feature Highlights

• Dedicated PCIe 3.0 x16 bus bandwidth
• Dedicated PCIe 3.0 x4 bandwidth for each NVMe M.2 SSD
• Over 8X faster than NVMe storage locked behind Intel DMI 3.0
• Independent, Stand-Alone NVMe SSD Solution
• Scale Performance across Multiple SSD7101 cards
• Supports Windows & Linux Systems

Pricing and Availability

HighPoint announced that all drives are available in the US now. Other markets may vary. The rSSD7101A is the Enthusiast series and it is priced at $799, $1099, $1599, and $2899 for the 500GB, 1TB, 2TB, and 4TB versions. The rSSD7101B costs a little more with $1,199, $1,999, $3,899, and $7,099 for the 1TB, 2TB, 4TB, and 8TB add-in cards.