Designed for high-performance RAID enclosures
The Glyph HighPoint card is a 3Gbps/port eSATA card which uses a PCIe slot in your computer. It’s designed to be used with enclosures holding two or more drives, such as the GT 062E and the ForteRAID, and delivers 300MB/s on each of it’s eSATA connections. The HighPoint card is well matched with the ForteRAID, which sustains over 230MB/s in RAID 0 mode. Performance like this is perfect for NLE applications such as Avid Xpress, Adobe Premiere, and Final Cut Pro*; and removes the speed bottleneck for digital photography applications, content creation, and huge sound libraries.
With Glyph Manager software
The HighPoint card allows Glyph Manager 4 software to display health status of the GT 062E and the ForteRAID over eSATA**. Glyph Manager offers a rich user interface which reports enclosure temperature, fan speed, individual drives' health status and temperature, as well as any drive errors or rebuild failures. Glyph Manager constantly monitors the health of the ForteRAID and GT 062E as a background task using S.M.A.R.T. commands. If a problem is detected, it blinks the front LEDs red, and bounces an icon in the Mac OS X dock or displaying an error balloon from the Windows System Tray, alerting the user to open Glyph Manager for more information. By constantly monitoring the drives, you have a chance to backup your data before any is lost due to drive failure.
In combination with Glyph Products
While the HighPoint card is designed to be used with higher-performance multi-drive enclosures, it is overkill for single-drive enclosures. The EC2 card is designed to be used with single-drive enclosures such as the GT 050Q. A single drive such as the GT 050Q can sustain about 100MB/s, and the EC2 card is capable of 125MB/s, making them a good match. Using a faster connection to the drive doesn't deliver an increase in performance.
Advanced Features
The HighPoint card also supports 15,000 and 10,000 rpm SAS (serial attached SCSI) drives if connected to a non-Glyph SAS enclosure. Its on-board RAID controller supports RAID 0,1,5,10 and JBOD when connected to a SATA or SAS enclosure. It supports 3Gb/s (300MB/s) transfer rates, Write-through and write-back cache, S.M.A.R.T. drive monitoring for status and reliability, Native Command Queuing, 64bit LBA for over 2TB support, Hot swap and hot spare, port multipliers with FIS-based switching, support for internal and external storage configurations, and enclosure management.
Driver Download
You’ll need to install a driver for the HighPoint card. For Mac OS X 10.4 and above, be sure to install Glyph's proprietary Mac OS X driver which is also available on the Glyph branded CD that ships with the card. This Mac driver allows Glyph Manager to work with Glyph RAID products such as the GT 062E and ForteRAID**. Drivers for Windows and all other operating systems can be found on the HighPoint branded CD that came with your card, or can be downloaded from the HighPoint web site. Go to Support > Bios + Drivers > find the RocketRAID 2642. Downloading the driver may be safest since HighPoint may release new drivers since you bought your card. Make sure to download the Non-RAID Version, not the RAID Version.
*ForteRAID with Glyph HighPoint card supports 2 streams of ProRes 422 1080i, 60 fps (HQ and lower); and 4 streams of Apple AIC 720p, 24 fps. Tested under FW800 and eSATA on Mac Pro with OS 10.5.8. Not qualified for Uncompressed HD (8-bit or 10-bit) playback or editing.
**HighPoint card works with Glyph Manager 4 under Macintosh only. Glyph Manager 4 is supported On Windows XP, Vista, and Windows 7 machines with motherboards that include onboard eSATA.