Two years ago, TweakTown reviewed the SSD7540 PCIe Gen4 M.2 RAID card from HighPoint Technologies, which achieved an impressive 28 GB/s sequential performance. Wanting to see how things have improved since then, the site decided to put HighPoint's Rocket 1608A PCIe Gen5 x16 card to the test.
With a theoretical bandwidth of 64 GB/s, the Rocket 1608A is an upgraded version of the SSD7540, featuring a full-length, single-slot design with a 6-pin VGA power supply and fan-cooled heatsink.
The Rocket 1608A functions as a switch and lacks a RAID/controller interface between its Broadcom PLX89048 switch and its 8 PCIe Gen5 x4 M.2 lanes. This design ensures plug-and-play compatibility with any operating system that has an integrated NVMe controller. The Rocket 1608A is also backward compatible with PCIe Gen4 SSDs, enabling up to 56GB/s performance from 8 PCIe Gen4 x4 M.2 SSDs with up to 64TB raw capacity.
The fastest storage device ever created
For testing, the Rocket 1608A's 8 M.2 slots were filled with five, six, and then eight of Crucial's ultra-fast T705 2TB Gen5 SSDs.
The Rocket 1608A achieved nearly 60GB/s sequential performance with 5 SSDs (59.8GB/s to be exact), and while adding more drives didn't significantly increase speed due to the limitations of the PCIe Gen5 x16 slot, it did. provided much more storage.
You can see all the benchmark results on TweakTown's testing page, but essentially the site determined that HighPoint's Rocket 1608A Gen5 x16 NVMe Switch AIC is now the fastest storage device, with twice the sequential performance of its predecessors.
However, there is a caveat. As the site says: “Of course, the new performance champion is not for the mainstream consumer and won't run mainstream consumer workloads better than a single SSD. However, if you are a high-volume content creator or running huge data sets that benefit from high queue depth sequential performance, then we say this is your Holy Grail of storage devices, capable of delivering levels record of efficiency that translates into more profits for your business.”
