HighPoint Technologies (http://www.hptmac.com/) has launched the US$125 RocketU Quad USB 3.0 for Mac. It's the industry's first 4-port PCI-E 2.0 x4 USB 3.0 RAID HBA and is designed specifically for the Mac Pro.

The RocketU Quad USB 3.0 for Mac supports single disk and RAID configurations, including 0, 1, 5, 10 and JBOD. The RocketU USB 3.0 for Mac provides four dedicated 5Gb/s ports and delivers 20Gb/second of throughput.

The HBA design ensures that each device port delivers true USB 3.0 SuperSpeed transfer rates, according to the folks at HighPoint. Four dedicated device ports and PCI-E 2.0 x4 bus speeds eliminate the performance bottlenecks associated with conventional USB cards, and provide the throughput needed for today’s fastest external drives and enclosures, they add.

Each of the RocketU Quad USB 3.0 for Mac’s foour dedicated USB 3.0 ports supports 5Gb/s transfer speed. The RocketU Quad USB 3.0 for Mac also supports single drives and non-RAID configurations, and will automatically recognize external hard disks and SSD’s that already contain user data. The RocketU Quad USB 3.0 for Mac supports USB drives of any generation, is fully backwards compatible with USB 1.1 and 2.0 enclosures, and can be installed into any free PCI-E slot.