I do get the part that you had troubles with them /in the past/ concerning another product line. I don't get that you are clinging onto history while it is imho pretty obvious that Highpoint wants to sell the Rocket 750 card to FreeNAS datahoarders as well and even fixes problems specific to FreeNAS users.
Uh.. what!? By that logic we should have had the C2750D4I Marvell controller fixed over a year ago. It was intended for the FreeNAS community. Even their *own* documentation makes heavy mentions of FreeNAS. Notice that I've already said that the C2750D4I is broken and there is no ETA at present.
Let's look at the alleged WRT54G successor...
the WRT1900AC. That was supposed to be all "community friendly",
and it was no such thing. Even now, one of my friends that bought one of those gave it up and switched to pfsense because it never really became the product that Linksys wanted it to be.
Highpoint is in the same boat. They wanted it to be great for FreeNAS. In fact, they sent me a free controller (4520 I think it was) so I could use it, help them fix it up and such. It supposedly supports JBOD. So I got the controller and figured out I couldn't do SMART. So I went back to them so that I could get it added and such. Nope, no dice. What they want to do, and the effort they are willing to put into it, are not the same thing, at all.
I do NOT recommend hardware based on promises. I learned a decade ago that expecting companies to honor their promises after you've bought the product is really damn stupid on your part unless they have a history of actually honoring their promises. I just showed 3 examples from 3 different companies that those promises mean absolutely nothing. I also just showed that the *exact* company you are discussing has already gone back on their promises. So why the hell would I *ever* recommend them until they've actually proven themselves with more than some extremely cheap lipservice that they plan to support it into the future. They can put their damn money where their mouth is and prove it. Until then, their history with their own products with FreeNAS has been so poor as to be unreasonably unreliable, especially for something that we want... no, need... to be reliable.
If your expectations are low enough that you want to trust highpoint, go for it. Buy it, use it, recommend it to others. You'll be the guy that gets questioned by dozens of people when you tell someone to buy the 750 and 6 months later it's not working. And you'll be just as helpless as they are if Highpoint decides to abandon the 750, doesn't want to put devs where their mouth is, etc.
Intel is going off your list because their ARK is erroneus. AMD never was on there. Are you building ARM servers in the future?
You'd better be quoting me where I said Intel is going off my list. Because I've said no such thing, ever. The only thing I have said is that if you want to trust ECC, you'd better go with Xeons.
AMD has never on my list because I wrote them off a decade ago, and nobody here has ever offered any evidence that contradicts what I've seen. In fact, I'd argue that there's such an overwhelming quantity of easily observable evidence against AMD that I don't even need to discuss it further.
ARM... yeah, you're silly for even mentioning that in 2015. There is no ARM version of FreeNAS, so you're just making silly statements now.