HighPointTechnologies 4-Port M.2 SSD6204A NVMe Boot RAID Controller for VMware ESXi & Virtualization Systems, Green

1/11/25 - This is a review of the HighPoint SSD6204A RAID card.My hardwareAsus ROG Crosshair VIII Dark Hero x570 Motherboard with Ryzen 5900X. A 3080 graphics card is using top x16 slot. SS6204A card will go into second x16 slot. According to the motherboard manual, this will cause both x16 slots to operate as x8. I knew this before purchase. Various reviews/benchmarks indicate the GPU will lose 1 or 2 fps doing this. This was a completely acceptable trade-off for the added capability. (Compatibility note: I'm using an AM4 socket/board. If using the newer AM5, I believe a X870E is required as it will support two x8 PCIe lanes in two x16 slots. Cheaper X870 boards (that I've seen) do not but rather split x16 in one slot and x4 in the other.)Maximizing the buildI decided to go with RAID 0 for the capacity and high speed. I know with RAID 0 any lost drive can result in all data being lost, but I have backups for critical files. I ended up using Samsung 990 EVO Plus drives. For me, good brand and good reliability.InstallationInstall 4 drives onto SSD6204A card. Flip both DIP switches on card to "on" position for RAID 0. That's it. No special drivers. No proprietary software configuration. It's a hardware RAID. What an extreme pleasure to have something that just works without having to do back-flips and hair pulling.WindowsI booted into Windows 11 23H2 normally. New drive was seen by Disk Management just like any other new blank drive. All I had to format it and assign a drive letter. That's it.LinuxFor backups, I image my PC's boot (C:) drive to an "old" 7200 RPM hard disk drive using Clonezilla. Clonezilla runs from a bootable Linux USB Drive (using Ventoy and Parted Magic). It's actually saved me multiple times so I wanted to keep using it. One interesting question was whether the new RAID would be visible to Linux. I'm happy to report it does if booted with UEFI. In case anyone is wondering, I'm not planning to backup to the RAID (as archiving excessively to flash memory will wear it out), but the fact that Linux does see the drive speaks to the SSD6204A invisible compatibility to multiple operating systems, and gives me another file source/destination if I absolutely needed it. This is another reason I chose to use a hardware RAID vs using a Windows software RAID.TempsThe Samsung 990 Evo Plus drives have an operating temperature from 0°C to 70°C. While moving several TB of data to the new SSD6204A RAID, HighPoint RAID Management's Storage Health Inspector (SHI) web page showed the drive temps never exceeded 40.5°C. This excellent result is probably due to (1) the SSD6204A's massive passive heatsink and (2) the GPU fans splashing air onto the back of the SSD6204A (I have the GPU fans set to run at a minimum 857 RPM so they are on constantly and are very quiet at that speed).Sales ProcessThe biggest downside to all of this is HighPoint themselves. Pre-sales communications via their web page form and Email received two curt replies days later. A follow up Email with questions went unanswered. Calls (about 7) to their phone number was met with the same polite recorded voice message each time. I felt like they're ghosting me. Ah well...no different than other tech companies right?PurchaseI wanted a 16TB NVMe. It doesn't exist. What does exist are NVMe RAID cards and a great Amazon.com return policy. Given one good Amazon review, and an excellent mini review of a SSD6204 by Serve The Home's Will Tailliac (dated Jan 23, 2023), I decided to buy. Cost was $1364 with tax for the SSD6204A ($181) and four Samsung 990 EVO Plus ($270 each). The total may seem high but it's not. It's actually close to the cost of two 8TB NVMe drives which are not RAID'd in the first place.SpeedPer CrystalDiskMark 8.0.6 x64, the new SSD6402A RAID reads at 6876.10 MB/s and writes at 5955.19 MB/s. These speeds are about the same as my Samsung 980 Pro NVMe boot drive. My old data drive was a 8TB SSD connected via SATA with read 548.92 MB/s and 491.77 MB/s. This 10x increase in read and write performance really does make the PC feel much faster (it's quite noticable).SummaryCard works. Proven/reliable from various posts I've seen and now very affordable. Driverless compatibility with both Windows 11 and Linux. Fanless (so completely silent) with very good temps. No PCI bifurcation needed. Speed on par with other 7000 MB/s drive technology. Great purchase!1/15/25 - Emailed HighPoint again with a post-sale question, and it was answered in a day. Not bad.2/02/25 - Discovered a bug. Under Storage Health Inspector(SHI) > NVME S.M.A.R.T Attributes, Unsafe Shutdowns keep increments by 1 after sleep, hibernate, or power off/on. Per HighPoint Technical Support: "This is a bug in the SSD6204A firmware and does not affect the normal use of the SSD6204A.", in a later Email "Yes, it should be that all SSD6204A have this issue, which is a Marvell chip issue." I've run "Properties > Tools > Check > Scan Drive" many times on the SSD6204A with no errors. Rating has been dropped from 5 to 4 stars due to this bug. Even given this, I'm still very happy with the card as it otherwise works so well.4/01/25 - Card continues to work well. Unsafe Shutdowns counter is now at 0xd5 with no issues (Windows drive scan came back with no errors). On a different topic, I did stumble upon a FAQ on Highpoint's website titled "HighPoint RAID Partition Loss Caused by Windows 11 24h2 Installation Bug". A quick Google search for "windows 11 24h2 safe?" shows results that 24h2 has bugs at this time. I've disabled the upgrade for now and sticking to Win11 23H2.

Edit: One of the SSDs failed to read after a month. The company DOES NOT honor their warranty! After contacting the company, they gave me a whole back and forth about why my card "should" be functioning properly and asked me to install software, as well as run diagnostics. Even after running the diagnostics (which by the way, should be their job, not mine!), they confirmed that one of the slots was not showing up in the diag. log. However, they STILL did not RMA my device. Further, they are clearly not on US time (I'm on the east coast) because you only get one response email per day, usually at 4am (which I assume is business hours where they are). So after 3 weeks of back and forth, they do not honor their warranty for a device they clearly determined as faulty.When the device worked, it worked (see original review below)! But just be aware, if you ever need a replacement under warranty, you will probably be out of luck. Trusting Amazon's 30 day return window is a bad bed, as my card started malfunctioning outside of the window and was reliant on the company.Original review:This review is for SSD6204A. The company has other versions of this product but I can't speak for those. As for this product:The card is a PCIE 3.0 x8 interface with 4 NVME slots. I haven't tried the on-board RAID function but, in JBOD mode, it shows up as 4 individual drives in your system (assuming you're in an x8 or more slot). I am running this in an AMD x870 PCIE 5.0 system (I have tested in on x670 PCIE 4.0 with the same results). I am also running it on a PCIE riser, WITH a PCIE splitter turning my x16 slot into an 8x8 slot. I have however tested the following configurations:All windows 11No riser in a PCIE4 x16 slotRiser in a PCIE4 x16 slotNo riser in a PCIE4 x16 slot running in x8 modeRiser in a PCIE4 x16 slot running in x8 modeNo riser in a PCIE4 x16 slot with an 8x8 splitterRiser in a PCIE4 x16 slot with an 8x8 splitterI have tested all of these configurations in a PCIE5 slot as well. All of which worked flawlessly.As far as I can tell, the card is in x8 mode with each NVME getting x2 bandwidth. So, each card gets roughly 1.7GBPS, which is pretty consistent with PCIE3 x2 speeds (2GBPS minus overhead). In my configuration, and as shown in my photos, I have 3 drives in a RAID 0. This cluster is getting roughly 5.4GBPS which is in line with 3 times the speed of a single drive. The other drive is standalone and the speed is shown in the other photo.Overall, this card does what it says it does and works without issue, once you set the jumpers on the back to your desired configuration. Also note: out of the box the jumpers are set to the "none" configuration. YOU MUST SET THE JUMPERS ON BACK BEFORE ANYTHING WILL REGISTER IN YOUR SYSTEM. The configurations on offer are JBOD, RAID 1, and RAID 0. I did not test for temps as, I just wanted to make sure everything works before deploying this card in a system, and while I was in my return window in case it didn't work. With that being said, the underside of a dual-sided NVME will need thermal pads, they are not included with the card, and there is no thermal insulation on that side by default. The card includes one big pad that covers the top of the NVMEs (it really should include 4 individual pads but, small annoyance)

update a year later. 1. When RAID is degraded, an incessant and loud beep that is difficult to turn off. Not from the webGUI, BIOS or elsewhere you would think2. slow rebuild, cant check status through bios mgtHow can this not be more popular? I looked high and low for something like this. Vastly different thenSSD6204. even though just an "A" added to model no. works. you configure raid in BIOS! trippy. a new entry shows in the DEL invoked bios for the MARVELL RAID UTIL

Configured raid. It said reboot. Then it completely bricked my Mac during booting process. Cost me 5x the cost of the card and 2 days of my life. It sucks.