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El Salvador, San Salvador
1 Level
699 Review
48 Karma

Review on High Point SSD7103 Bootable Controller by Kevin Parker

Revainrating 5 out of 5

Best NVMe boot solution

I've been using the HighPoint SSD7101A-1 for a while now and I think it's the best M.2 RAID card out there. I've used it for high-end workflows in the past (I edit high-resolution videos). I was looking for a bootable solution similar to the SSD7101A-1 card and HighPoint offered me their SSD7103 model. I now have a solution that can be used as a boot disk for my operating system. The NVMe interface is so fast and seamless. The operating system will load immediately. At first I received compromised test results as seen in some of the other reviews here, but then I found a guide on the company's website that showed me how to tune my system to get the best performance out of the controller . Adjusting the system settings and tweaking the Crystal Disk settings definitely made a difference when trying to figure out the real-world performance of this thing. My setup is running on a 3.30GHz processor and I am using 2 Samsung 970 Pro 512GB drives and 2 Samsung 970 Pro 1TB drives. With all the steps I followed based on the company's recommendations, I actually got a top speed of 14GB/s on IOMeter. This company makes creating a boot disk very easy with their user guide for installing Windows, and the cool thing is that you have the choice of creating a bootable RAID for the operating system or just having the operating system on a hard drive with it I can have multiple operating systems. In fact, I can boot SEVERAL OS from this card, like Win 10 and CentOS 7.6. Even if you have no idea how to mess around with UEFI settings, HighPoint makes it pretty handy with its user guide. Please note that your processor must be running at high speed (3.3GHz minimum) and installed in a working PCIe 3.0 x 16 slot for this product to REALLY perform to its full potential. I have several other systems where I have tested this product and have found that the clock speed should always be high for the best results. HighPoint also offers a list of motherboards and chipsets compatible with the card on their website, which I made sure to check before using the card in my setup.

Pros
  • Up to 4 preconfigured M.2 MLC, TLC and qlc NVMe SSDs. Data Boot Storage Mode
Cons
  • Ugly Packaging