Two years ago, TweakTown reviewed HighPoint Technologies' SSD7540 PCIe Gen4 M.2 RAID card, which achieved an impressive 28GB/s sequential throughput. Wanting to see how things have improved since, the site decided to put HighPoint’s PCIe Gen5 x16 Rocket 1608A card through its paces.
With a theoretical bandwidth of 64GB/s, the Rocket 1608A is an improved version of the SSD7540, featuring a single slot, full-length design with a 6-pin VGA power source and a fan-cooled heatsink.
The Rocket 1608A operates as a switch, lacking a driver/RAID interface between its Broadcom PLX89048 switch and its 8 PCIe Gen5 x4 M.2 channels. This design ensures plug-and-play compatibility with any OS with a built-in NVMe driver. The Rocket 1608A is also backward compatible with PCIe Gen4 SSDs, allowing up to 56GB/s throughput from 8x PCIe Gen4 x4 M.2 SSDs with up to 64TB raw capacity.
Fastest storage device ever
For the tests, Rocket 1608A’s 8x M.2 slots were populated with five, six and then eight of Crucial's super-fast T705 2TB Gen5 SSDs.
The Rocket 1608A achieved nearly 60GB/s sequential throughput with 5x SSDs (59.8GB/s to be exact) and while adding more drives did not significantly increase speed due to PCIe Gen5 x16 slot limitations, it did provide a lot more storage.
You can view all the benchmarking results on TweakTown’s test page, but essentially the site determined that HighPoint's Rocket 1608A Gen5 x16 NVMe Switch AIC is now the fastest storage device, with double the sequential throughput of its predecessors.
There is a caveat though. As the site says, “Of course, the new throughput champion isn't for the common consumer, and it won't run common consumer workloads any better than a single SSD. However, if you are a high-volume content creator or run huge data sets that benefit from high queue depth sequential throughput, then we say to you, this right here is your Holy Grail of storage devices, capable of delivering record levels of efficiency which translates as more profit for your business.”
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