The Package

HighPoint has gone for a new colour scheme with its SAS series of controllers; rather than blue, white and red, we now have a white, yellow and blue colour scheme. The red has been removed from the theme. On the front of the box we have a full colour photo of the controller card along with some basic specs.

On the back of the box HighPoint has gone to the trouble of placing the same marketing info that appears on the website for the controller; this means you don't have to go looking on the web for any additional info and everything that is on the HighPoint website in regards to the 2640X4 controller is on the back of the box.

Inside the box you get a set of data and power cables. Since SAS drives use a special power/data port compared to SATA, they look almost similar but don't have keys, so a new power/data cable port is included that go on the drives. These then plug into standard 4 pin molex power connectors for HDD power and a standard SATA port on the controller (since they share the same 7-pin design).

The Controller

The controller card itself is extremely small in footprint; HighPoint hasn't gone with wasting PCB space here. On the front of the controller you have four SATA ports and the controller chip that runs the SAS/SATA system. One thing about SAS controllers is the fact that they support SAS drives as well as SATA drives, making SAS controllers an extremely versatile controller.

The back of the card is bare apart from the bar code label affixed during manufacturing. The controller interfaces with the motherboard using a x4 PCI Express connector; you can use it in any PCI Express x16, x8, x4 or universal slot.

Powering the controller is Marvell's 88SE6445 PCI Express controller chip. We have seen this chip on other SAS controllers from HighPoint. This chip supports four single channel SAS ports with backwards compatibility for SATA 2.5 specs. One thing missing for this controller is a dedicated cache memory, but since this controller isn't aimed for the server market, it's not required.