Two years ago, TweakTown reviewed the SSD7540 PCIe Gen4 M.2 RAID card from HighPoint Technologies, which achieved an impressive sequential throughput of 28 GB/s. Wanting to see how things have improved since then, the site decided to try out HighPoint’s PCIe Gen5 x16 Rocket 1608A card.
With a theoretical bandwidth of 64 GB/s, the Rocket 1608A is an improved version of the SSD7540, featuring a full-length single-slot design, a 6-pin VGA power source, and a fan-cooled heatsink.
The Rocket 1608A works as a switch and lacks a driver/RAID interface between the Broadcom PLX89048 switch and the 8 PCIe Gen5 x4 M.2 channels. This design ensures plug-and-play compatibility with any operating system with a built-in NVMe driver. The Rocket 1608A is also backwards compatible with PCIe Gen4 SSDs, enabling throughput of up to 56 GB/s from 8x PCIe Gen4 x4 M.2 SSDs with a gross capacity of up to 64 TB.
Fastest storage device ever
For the tests, Rocket 1608A’s 8x M.2 slots were filled with five, six, and then eight of Crucial’s super-fast T705 2TB Gen5 SSDs.
The Rocket 1608A achieved nearly 60 GB/s sequential throughput with 5x SSDs (59.8 GB/s to be precise) and while adding more drives didn’t significantly increase speed due to PCIe Gen5 x16 slot limitations, it did much more storage space.
You can view all benchmark results at TweakTown’s test pagebut essentially the site found 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 one caveat. As the site says: “Of course, the new throughput champion isn’t for the mainstream consumer, and it won’t run mainstream consumer workloads any better than a single SSD. However, if you create large amounts of content or manage massive data sets that benefit from sequential throughput with high queue depth, we tell you: this is your holy grail of storage devices, capable of delivering record levels of efficiency that translates into more profits for your business .”