PCIe card specialist HighPoint has developed the first dual-slot NVMe RAID add-in card, the SSD7749E. The card is designed for server applications with support for up to eight E1.S SSDs and a unique dual-fan cooling solution to keep all eight SSDs running cool. The card can act as a RAID card or a simple NVMe expansion card, supporting RAID 0, 1, 10, or non-RAID configurations.
Even though dual-slot cards are standard in the consumer space, particularly among graphics cards, dual-slot AICs for storage cards are non-existent. According to HighPoint, the primary purpose of the SSD7749E's dual slot design is to improve the card's cooling capability for future NVMe storage devices with speeds of up to 14GB/s. We already have drives like these in the consumer space in the form of the Best SSDs featuring PCIe Gen 5 connectivity. Still, these blisteringly fast storage speeds have yet to make their way to the server industry.
For more details on some of the best PCIe Gen 5 SSDs, check out our list of Best SSDs. For clarification, the SSD7749E does not support PCIe Gen 5 speeds and only supports Gen 4 speeds featuring a PCIe Gen 4 x16 interface.
The cooling system on the SSD7749 is very unconventional, featuring a "left to right" airflow strategy. Two low-decibel cooling fans are mounted on the side, pushing air directly into the card. Once through the card, all the hot air exhausts out of the other side of the card, similar to blower-style GPUs.
This design philosophy is very different from regular expansion cards, which favor front-mounted fans that cool the card from top to bottom rather than side to side. The benefit of side-to-side cooling is its inherent compatibility with 1U and 2U server chassis, which feature the same cooling solution for chassis cooling.
Besides cooling, the SSD7749E boasts eight 9.5mm E.1S storage drives thanks to vertically stacked drive slots. E1.S is a slightly larger variant of M.2 explicitly designed for the server industry. It is reportedly the successor of U.2 and features five different-size options to accommodate various storage solutions. The storage slots on the SSD7749E are also toolless, allowing for straightforward drive installations.
With eight drives installed, the card can speed up to 28 GB/s via a PCIe Gen 4 x16 interface and up to an even more impressive 55 GB/s with HighPoint's Cross-Sync RAID technology. As previously stated, the card features support for RAID 0,1, and 10 arrays along with independent drive configurations. Under lighter workloads or separate drive configurations, PCIe switching technology enables up to four PCIe Gen 4 lanes to be dynamically allocated to a single drive to boost performance.
HighPoint's new dual-slot AIC also features a CPU core performance optimizer that reportedly fixes allocation issues when using the storage drive. Having this feature enabled should boost SSD performance. Due to its server roots, the SSD7749E is anything but cheap, costing $1,499.