Introduction

By now, most of us know of Highpoint Technologies. If you don't, where have you been the past 3 years? Highpoint made a name for itself back when the UDMA standards had just hit 66Mb/s. Highpoint was the first to market with the HPT336 two port ATA-66 IDE controller chip. This chip was first adopted by ABIT on the BE6 motherboard. From here this chip was pushed to the limits, and even modified to allow RAID on the IDE system - the first ever on a desktop motherboard. Highpoint revised the chip to support RAID functions without having to modify the BIOS. This is where Highpoint took the market on hard and fast.

From there it has been a non-stop ride for Highpoint, ATA-100 and 133 standards gave the company more ground, as it took quite some time for the standards be integrated into Southbridges, and if you wanted the newer speeds, you needed an external chip, and Highpoint was the chip of choice.

Serial ATA has now given Highpoint another bite at the cherry. The well known IC solution provider has been producing Serial ATA cards now for some time, but it's not their internal Serial ATA that we are impressed with, more so their external Serial ATA solutions.

So far there is no standard for external Serial ATA. Highpoint has decided to taken on e.SATA, a new external Serial ATA interface using existing Serial ATA technologies.