HighPoint RocketAIC 7608AW Review: The Fast Gets Even Faster with 56 GB/s of throughput

Extreme capacity, extreme performance

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HighPoint RocketAIC 7608AW
(Image credit: © Tom's Hardware)

Tom's Hardware Verdict

The HighPoint RocketAIC 7608AW is a beastly storage solution, but mainstream consumer applications are limited.

Pros

  • +

    64TB capacity

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    High-end PCIe 5.0 Technology

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    RAID software & management

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    Hardware encryption, RAID

Cons

  • -

    Overall cost

  • -

    Limited consumer application

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There’s storage, and then there’s insane storage like the RocketAIC, which can deliver up to an incredible 56 GB/s of bandwidth. A single add-in card with 64TB of high-end, PCIe 5.0 SSDs ready to plop into an x16 PCIe slot of your choice? That’s the HighPoint RocketAIC 7608AW. We’re no strangers to high-end storage solutions, but this is the fastest thing we’ve tested to date, and it’s not even close. This wouldn’t be so awe-inspiring if it didn’t include the first and only 8TB high-end PCIe 5.0 SSD to date: the Samsung 9100 Pro, which we only reviewed recently. This is dialed up to 11 and impressively remains easy to handle, with no serious cooling concerns.

That’s because HighPoint includes a software suite for direct monitoring and management of your drives or arrays, with an actively cooled aluminum heatsink and dual-layer thermal padding to keep everything tight. You can get out-of-this-world bandwidth with capacities rivaling even the largest HDDs with just a single PCIe slot. Yeah, this means some serious power consumption, but in the grand scheme of things, SSDs are pretty power-efficient. There’s really no substitute for this level of performance if you’re someone actively engaged in AI, serious content creation, or SOHO server tasks.

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Shane Downing
Shane Downing
Freelance Reviewer

Shane Downing is a Freelance Reviewer for Tom’s Hardware US, covering consumer storage hardware.

4 Comments Comment from the forums
  • thestryker
    This is a really interesting device and I'd love to see a cheaper one, perhaps with a narrower interface and fewer slots, which could be used for home/small business type storage expansion.

    Every time I see one of these it just makes me sad what happened due to the Broadcom acquisition of PLX. To my knowledge there are only two companies making PCIe switches above PCIe 3.0, Broadcom and Microchip, both of which charge very high premiums. This card would always be expensive due to the features, but in a rational world where there's actual competition it'd be closer to $1000 than $2000.

    ASMedia is the only other company I can think of which ships volume PCIe switches but theirs cap out at PCIe 3.0. I used to think it was due to them just being a smaller player, but doing some parts research earlier this year led me to finding out they're an Asus company. While I don't expect them to be competing at the leading edge or enterprise it's surprising to me that they don't make PCIe 4.0 switches. I would think if nothing else this should make for a great competitive advantage for Asus. They also have advanced USB controllers so it's not like they don't have any engineering work with PCIe 4.0 going on.
    Reply
  • Soul_keeper
    I remember when their PATA cards would sell for something low like $100.
    Pricing these days is insane. They used to target consumers, the boxes were on the shelves at the local pc stores. Now everyone just assumes were have big $ like the crypto/ai big guys. I'm running 3x nvme software raid in linux because of the price barrier for one of these cards.
    With a fast cpu, software raid can match/beat these addon cards.
    Reply
  • Cervisia
    thestryker said:
    ASMedia … cap out at PCIe 3.0.
    ASMedia makes the AM5 chipset ("Promontory 21"), which contains a PCIe switch with four PCIe 4.0 upstream lanes and twelve downstream lanes (eight PCIe 4.0, four PCIe 3.0).
    In theory, it would be possible to use this chip as a plain PCIe switch.
    Reply
  • palladin9479
    Soul_keeper said:
    I remember when their PATA cards would sell for something low like $100.
    Pricing these days is insane. They used to target consumers, the boxes were on the shelves at the local pc stores. Now everyone just assumes were have big $ like the crypto/ai big guys. I'm running 3x nvme software raid in linux because of the price barrier for one of these cards.
    With a fast cpu, software raid can match/beat these addon cards.

    This isn't for consumers, this is profession workstation or server stuff. Where I'm at we have a team that uses specialized data modeling software to analyze smart power meter utilization data from the entire USA and generate utilization models and pricing guidelines. They frequently consume many TB worth of data for each run, and those runs take hours to process largely due to disk IO contention. This was after we moved them from a NAS to local NVME on a specialized workstation, before then runs took 18~24 hours. We have discussed purchasing a solution like this for them as a way to get their runs under an hour as they really want to do more frequent modeling.
    Reply