HighPoint Technologies, Inc. SSD6204A 4x M.2 PCIe 3.0 x8 RAID controller

Four-port M.2 RAID controller

The HighPoint SSD6204A adds four M.2 slots to a server or workstation through a single PCI-Express 3.0 x8 connection. It presents each NVMe drive to the operating system as a bootable RAID 0, RAID 1 or JBOD array without requiring a vendor driver. Management is handled through UEFI, a command-line interface or a web-based GUI, and the card includes an out-of-band port, LED status indicators, an alarm buzzer and SMTP email alerts for array health.

Fits a PCIe 3.0 x8 slot and holds four drives

Installation requires one full-height PCI-Express 3.0 x8 slot and enough physical clearance for the 7.68 by 4.38 by .73 inch board. The four M.2 sockets accept 2242, 2260, 2280 and 22110 form factors in single-sided or double-sided variants, so existing drives can be reused without adapters. Because the controller is driverless, the host system needs no extra kernel modules on Linux 3.10 or later, Windows 10 or 11, Windows Server 2016 through 2022, Hyper-V, VMware, Proxmox or XenServer, freeing administrative time for other tasks.

Four drives at PCIe 3.0 x8 bandwidth

The x8 link delivers 8 GT/s aggregate throughput shared across the four ports, so sequential performance scales with the number of active SSDs until the bus saturates. RAID 0 arrays spread data across two or more drives for maximum capacity and speed, while RAID 1 mirrors pairs for redundancy at the cost of usable space. JBOD mode exposes each drive individually when RAID is not desired. The controller does not support RAID 5, 6 or 10, so workloads that require parity-based protection or larger striped sets will need a different solution.