HighPoint introduces the ATA66 chipset and controller to the industry. This chipset was adopted by many major motherboard manufacturers establishing HighPoint as a major player in the PC storage market. Next, the HPT37x ATA RAID Chipset was integrated into of storage products by major motherboard manufacturers and leading PC vendors. DIGILITE MOTHERBOARD VGA DRIVER FOR WINDOWS 7. Use smartlink network systems ltd, sata connectors india low price. Lan multi display output. Dancing creek farm. Hotel royal panna. Tosh c855 quanta zy9b hannstar j mv 4 hannstar-e89382. Smartlink network systems ltd. Digilite g41 series motherboards, vg4 intel g41 series, high point h61. Cost-effective, high-performance PCI-Express 2.0 6Gb/s SAS RAID controller, ideal for SMB server and workstation configurations. RocketRAID 2721 HBA's are fully backwards compatible with SAS/SATA 3Gb/s devices, PCI-Express 1.0 and 2.0 motherboards, and are. RocketRAID 2314 Driver. Highpoint RCM Device Driver. Highpoint HPT370 Windows Driver. This page contains drivers for HPT370 manufactured by Highpoint™. Please note we are carefully scanning all the content on our website for viruses and trojans. This and other Motherboards drivers we're hosting are 100% safe. We are commited to provide the latest avilable drivers for HPT370 and other devices. HighPoint’s rSSD7101 drive series unlocks the true potential of NVMe SSD’s. Unlike onboard DMI 3.0 based NVMe solutions, which are forced to share a single PCIe 3.0 x4 lane with the motherboard’s SATA and USB ports, rSSD7101 drives feature dedicated PCIe 3.0 x16 bus bandwidth.

I was lucky enough to take part in an Intel retailer incentive that netted me an Intel P4304BTLSFCN barebones system with an Intel Xeon 1230 and an Intel AXXRMS2AF080 on-board RAID module. I added some hard drives and 16 GB of ECC DDR3 RAM.

This is my new home server and since it has plenty of horsepower I installed Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows Home Server 2011 in a Hypervisor; not exactly sure what I would be using it for but WHS won’t use more than 8 GB of RAM so I set the Hypervisor to use two processors and 8 GB of RAM. For storage I had two WD Blue 250 GB hard drives in a RAID 1 array for the boot/OS installation and three WD Green 2 TB hard drives for RAID 5 WHS storage. Following some initial setup confusion, the motherboard’s BIOS needed to be cleared before it would recognize the installed AXXRMS2AF080, the boot drives were connected to the main SATA 6 Gb ports and the storage RAID 5 array connected to the AXXRMS2AF080. Putting that RAID array offline in Windows Server 2008 R2 allowed me to add it as a dedicated drive to the Hypervisor and will supposedly give me the best performance. Everything was installed, set up and ready to go.

Well, almost ready. The AXXRMS2AF080 uses an LSI chip for RAID 0, 1, 10, 5 and 50 but has no on-board cache. No problem, lots of modern RAID cards share system memory. Ya, not this one or so it seems because you can’t configure it for write back caching, only write through caching. Meaning it was getting 180 MB/s reads and 20 MB/s writes. Abysmal to say the least. Taking it off the Hypervisor and playing around with it in Windows Server 2008 R2 did nothing for the performance. I messed around with every combination of stripe and allocation unit size did nothing to improve things.

Checking online for suitable RAID cards with a price point below $200 led me again and again to the HighPoint RocketRAID 2720SGL: PCI-e 8x with 8 6Gb/s SATA and SAS ports through two SFF-8087 cables (I’ll get into it in the review later). I ordered it from Amazon and the SFF-8087 cables from Monoprice and was happy to get everything installed. I had the card before the cables, the SGL version has no cables and is $90 less but otherwise identical, so I installed it in Windows and set up the drivers and management interface. Everything looked good.

The cables arrived and I hooked up the WD Green 2 TB drives to the RocketRAID 2720SGL, configured a RAID 5 array in the card’s BIOS and then watched a flashing cursor after POST. Hmm. Unhooked the drives and the system booted normally. Hooked the drives back up and hit the blinking cursor. Went into the motherboard BIOS and fiddled with any setting I could find that would effect storage and booting to no avail. Updated the motherboard BIOS and still couldn’t get the system to boot. Googling boot failures with the S1200BTL motherboard yielded no results. I gave up and left it alone.

The next day I decided to tackle it from the perspective of the RocketRAID 2720SGL and Googled rocketraid intel motherboard boot and came across people with the same issue: nothing booting, just a blinking cursor. They pointed to this suggestion from the HighPoint website FAQ which is no longer available.

Answer: Some motherboards may be unable to load the card’s BIOS into memory, especially if other devices (such as onboard RAID or SCSI controllers) are active. This could prevent the card, or other device, from booting the system
If these additional controllers are not needed, try disabling them using the motherboard’s BIOS menu.
If this is not an option, press the “End” key when the host adapter’s BIOS is first displayed – this will cancel the card’s BIOS load.
This should prompt the motherboard to skip the host adapter card, and proceed to the next device.Arrays and disks attached to the card will still be accessible through the operating system.
To avoid pressing the “End” during every boot session, try disabling some of the card’s BIOS features. To do so, flash (upgrade) the card’s BIOS, and access the BIOS sub-menu.
If you intend to boot from the host adapter card, disable the option listed as “Reallocate EBDA”. If you do not need to boot from the host adapter card, disable both the “Reallocate EBDA” and “INT13″ options. For more information about this upgrade procedure, please download the BIOS User Manual posted at this link:

I downloaded the latest BIOS for the RocketRAID 2720SGL and followed the instructions for disabling Reallocate EBDA and INT13; to run at a command prompt type the following. The “/c” argument brings up a different menu to change BIOS features; it asked if I wanted to save the changes to a file and I tried it saving and not saving with the same result.

load.exe /c /v biosname.version (mine was rr2720.v15)

Rebooted the system and was finally back into Windows with a fully functioning hardware RAID 5 array. What a boondoggle.

What is VROC?

VROC stands for Virtual RAID on CPU. It is software that Intel originally designed with the data center in mind, but extended to their enthusiast line of products due to demand for RAID support for NVMe. Intel built VROC into their latest CPUs in order to allow consumers the option of managing RAID through the CPU. VROC allows NVMe SSDs to connect via PCIe connections and yet be directly managed on the CPU. It is used primarily to allow for NVMe RAID with NVMe SSDs on the CPU side of the motherboard. If hardware RAID is used on the chipset side of the motherboard, then it would be limited by the DMI (direct media interface) speed. Most motherboards use DMI 3.0 which has bandwidth constrictions equivalent to 4x PCIe 3.0 lanes (the same limitation on one m.2 PCIe 3.0 x4 drive. VROC allows NVMe SSDs to access formidable speeds (up to double their already fast speeds) in a bootable format. Unfortunately, VROC only supports Intel SSDs at this times, so you cannot use VROC to setup RAID with Samsung M.2 Drives.

VROC

1. Designed with the data center in mind
2. Virtual RAID on CPU
3. Software from Intel for RAID management on CPU
4. Allows NVMe SSDs to connect via PCIe connections and directly manage on the CPU circumventing the DMI bandwidth limitation
5. Only supports Intel drives (you cannot use with Samsung M.2 drives)
6. VROC is bundled with motherboards, but in order to use VROC, you also much purchase an Intel VROC key (dongle).

Threadripper NVMe RAID support

Highpoint Motherboards Drivers

In the Fall of 2017, AMD released Threadripper drivers that support bootable RAID 0, 1, and 10 NVMe RAID from your CPU. So, if you have an AMD Threadripper motherboard with 2X m.2 ports OR 2X U.2 ports, you can set your PCIe 3.0 x4 drives up in a NVMe RAID 0 (twice the performance) or RAID 1 (a backup solution) setup. For RAID 10 (twice the performance, plus a backup solution), you would need 4X m.2 or U.2 ports - or 2X of one and 2X of another and a converter, so that you could use FOUR of the same drive. AMD's Threadripper NVMe RAID support is absolutely free. No need to add a dongle to your NVMe support.

Why Can’t I Use The Old RAID?

You can use the old RAID. You can use your chipset RAID just as you have always done. However, since the previous version of RAID was located on the chipset, it had to go through the DMI and was limited by the speed of the DMI (direct media interface). Your DMI sits between the chipset and the CPU and negotiates the traffic that goes between from all your chipset devices. The latest version of DMI is DMI 3.0 and it has a bandwidth limitation of PCIe 3.0 x4 lanes.

HighPoint RAID Card

Highpoint Motherboards Drivers

You might be asking, 'why can't I just use a RAID card?' Again standard (old) RAID solutions operate using 4X PCIe 3.0 lanes on the chipset side of your motherboard. HOWEVER, HighPoint has come out with a solution that uses 16 lanes of PCIe 3.0 bus. High-end motherboards locate one or two PCIe 3.0 x16 slots on the CPU side of the motherboard. HighPoint's NVMe RAID solutions offer full use of your PCIe 3.0 x16 slot/s to create blazingly fast hard drive performance.

Highpoint Drivers

One NVMe PCIe 3.0 x4 m.2 drive, for instance, gives you almost 32 Gb/s performance. Highpoint's NVMe storage solutions can each utilize FOUR m.2 or u.2 drives (the drives plug into the NVMe RAID card directly), making this FOUR times the speed (RAID 0) OR FOUR times the volume of NVMe storage space otherwise possible. And if you have TWO available PCIe 3.0 x16 slots, you can utilize TWO HighPoint NVMe cards for a total of EIGHT NVMe PCIe 3.0 x4 drives, giving you EIGHT times the speed (RAID 0) OR EIGHT times the volume of NVMe storage space. This means you could potentially have 32TB of NVMe storage space operating at PCIe 3.0 x4 (32 Gb/s) OR the equivalent of ONE NVME PCIe 3.0 x4 drive running at up to 256 Gb/s.

How Do I Know Which NVMe RAID Solution Is Right For Me?

That's a good question. It depends. A HighPoint NVMe card isn't cheap. An Intel VROC dongle isn't cheap either, but it is about a quarter of the price of a HighPoint NVMe card. So, if you have a Threadripper machine and you have enough m.2 or U.2 slots to use Threadripper RAID to suite your needs, just do that. Threadripper RAID is including in the price of your motherboard and CPU. I you have one of the latest high-end Intel motherboards that support VROC, if you want to use an Intel U.2 drive, and if you have enough m.2 or U.2 slots to use VROC to suite your needs, use VROC. Keep in mind, however, even if you are using VROC or Threadripper RAID, the number of lanes your m.2 or U.2 drives support will be the number of CPU lanes that your RAID setup takes up. If you intend on adding graphics cards or accelerator cards which use PCIe 3.0 x16 also, this may cause a bottleneck in your system, if you don't plan appropriately. Finally, if you want to use Samsung m.2 drives OR if you need 4X or 8X m.2 or U.2 NVMe SSDs OR your motherboard does not provide the correct ports, you can use a HighPoint NVME card to take advantage of NVMe speed.