HP RocketRAID 620/622 SATA III 500MB/sec

Question

SATA III for Mac Pro
HighPoint has two PCI-Express 2.0 cards that support SATA III
RocketRAID 620 2 internal SATA III connectors
RocketRAID 622 2 eSATA connectors
* PCI Express connector 500 MB/s instead of the 600 MB/s possible with standard SATA III.
* Note PCI-Express 1x the data flow drops to 250 MB/s
* compatible with Snow Leopard without needing a driver.
* available November $70 and $80.
Rev up your SSDs?

Answer 1

And, will SATA II PM require new cases? Will the 5PM still work, but limited performance?
Hi,
The SeriTek/5PM enclosure uses a Silicon Image SiI-3726 port multiplier that is limited to a maximum of 250MB/s per enclosure. Multiple enclosures can be used to increase performance. You can see an example of this on the SeriTek/2ME4-E performance page found here: http://www.firmtek.com/seritek/seritek-2me4-e/perform/
As "6G" controller drivers are available with port multiplier support, all SiI-3726 based enclosures including the 5PM will work. The "6G" standard is backward compatible with 3G and 1.5. However, these enclosures will always be limited by the 250MB/s bandwidth limit found in the SiI-3726 PM. When hard disk performance was less than 90MB/s, the 250MB/s limitation was not that big of a deal as it took three hard disks to reach that limit. Now with the Samsung F3 providing up to 140-150MB/s with a single hard disk the port multiplier limit can be reached much sooner.
What the 5PM is really great at is increasing storage capacity. Since a single PM can support up to 5x the amount of disks as a direct connect configuration it will always provide the most disk space. 5 x 2TB = a 10TB enclosure on a single cable. Multiple enclosures can be used when both high capacity and higher performance are desired.
If the user does not need to support lots of hard disks, direct connect enclosures with one SATA cable per hard disk can provide very nice performance with a PCIe 4-lane Mac eSATA controller.
Pick your poison. Both PM and direct connect enclosures should work with "6G" controllers that support PM. What I am more concerned about is the possibility of enhanced Mac eSATA compatibility issues for hybrid enclosures that use eSATA/FireWire/USB or any combination of these multiple ports with the standard AHCI driver.