HighPoint Rocket 1608A add-in card review: More drives, more power

If one high-end SSD isn’t fast enough for you, then how about eight? The HighPoint Rocket 1608A AIC (add-in card) allows you to assemble up to eight PCIe 5.0 SSDs with sixteen lanes of upstream bandwidth. If the Crucial T705’s 14 GB/s just isn’t quite doing getting the job done, you can have four or more of them work together for faster transfers and insanely high IOPS. If you can deliver the right workload, that is.

Our last review of an AIC like this from HighPoint was almost seven years ago, but we’ve had our eye on the Rocket 1608A for some months. With more PCIe 5.0 SSDs and platforms coming to the market as time goes on, there’s a natural enthusiast desire to push for more bandwidth, and this AIC delivers. You don't need to use PCIe 5.0 SSDs either — today, we’re using eight PCIe 4.0 Samsung 990 Pros. You could even use a non-PCIe 5.0 slot for that matter, as you can still benefit from steady state performance improvements, higher IOPS, and some management features of the hardware. But for maximum burst performance, you'll want to have a PCIe 5.0 x16 slot available.

The Rocket 1608A is an all-in-one solution as it provides cooling, connectivity, and an on-board PCIe switch so you don’t have to rely on motherboard bifurcation. The card and switch feature everything from indicator LEDs to deeper features, like synthetic mode. It’s quite possible to get 56 GB/s or more with the right hardware, and although the price seems steep it’s not unreasonable if you consider the advantage of not needing expensive 8TB drives to reach your capacity goals.

This solution is not for everyone, though, as the Rocket 1608A’s full potential is best met in an HEDT or enterprise environment where high levels of performance are possible and at times necessary. This ideally takes advantage of a full x16 PCIe 5.0 slot and a fast CPU that can keep up. Still, it’s worth a look as an interesting product that shows how far solid state storage has come even on the consumer end of things. If it happens to fit your budget, then it’s worth fully exploring the product and what it can do.

HighPoint Rocket Specifications

The HighPoint Rocket 1608A is a high-end, PCIe 5.0 add-in card (AIC) designed as a multi-drive storage solution for appropriate server and workstation platforms. Its main upstream interface is 16 lanes in width, or x16, with support for up to a PCIe 5.0 link speed. That yields a theoretical maximum bandwidth of 64 GB/s in each direction, though real-world performance will tend to be slightly lower.

The Rocket 1608A uses a standard full-height form factor, clad with a heatsink, fan, and eight M.2 slots for NVMe SSDs. To help power the up to eight SSDs, each of which can potentially draw around 12W of peak power, there's a 6-pin PEG power connector at the back of the card — the 75W from the x16 slot would otherwise be insufficient. The card and a full drive load can pull up to 82.64W.

The AIC also has per-drive LEDs, as well as other features that we'll get into later. The AIC alone will cost you $1,499, $500 less than the 7608A version that has more features and full software support.

HighPoint Rocket Software and Accessories

Nothing special is required to install and run the HighPoint Rocket 1608A, but HighPoint does offer a number of resources and, for certain SKUs, software packages for its products. The Rocket 1608A comes with a quick install guide (QIG) but also has four other user guides available for download from HighPoint’s site, in addition to a compatibility list. These guides include a datasheet, an overall user guide, a port guide, and a guide for heatsink thermal pad replacement. The compatibility list shows tested compatible motherboards and NVMe SSDs — other hardware can work but may not perform optimally.

The Rocket 7608A, a version of the 1608A with HighPoint RAID technology support, can take advantage of HighPoint’s RAID management suites — the Storage Health and Analysis Suite and the RAID OS Driver Suite. This includes GUI, webGUI, and command line interface (CLI) management to set up the RAID features. It also allows for monitoring of the storage drives via the Storage Health Inspector (SHI), which has features such as SSD-specific temperature management, manual fan speed adjustment, sensor and alert controls, notifications, LED information, and more. The 7608A is also the SKU to get if you want OPAL encryption support, although some management features such as BMC and MCTP over PCIe may be supported by the 1608A.

For the Rocket 1608A, software RAID can be set up in the host operating system. For Windows this would be in Disk Management, Storage Spaces, or similar. The host OS does require NVMe driver support for this functionality. Different RAID configurations are possible, as is normal with multiple drives, which includes defining the stripe size if desired. HighPoint’s software for the 7608A defaults to 512KiB stripes, but you may want to change this for the 1608A depending on expected files and workload types. Certain drives may also be formatted in 4Kn over the default 512e, the former being superior for the anticipated use of this AIC with multiple high-end SSDs.

HighPoint Rocket: A Closer Look

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The Rocket 1608A is a full-height, single-width AIC (284mm x 110mm) with eight M.2 slots for M.2 2242, 2260, and 2280 SSDs. M.2 2230 SSDs could be extended for use in the AIC as well. This AIC is actually shorter than many bifurcation AICs, like the ASUS Hyper M.2 x16 Gen5 AIC, as those are higher than standard, unlike the Rocket 1608A. This can improve compatibility in some cases. The Rocket 1608A has a PCIe switch on-board and does not require motherboard PCIe bifurcation support. Additionally, this AIC holds twice as many SSDs as would be possible with the standard x4/x4/x4/x4 PCIe bifurcation loadout.

The Rocket 1608A comes with an aluminum heatsink that contains a cooling fan and a 6-pin PCIe connector for extra external power, which given the possible power draw is an important addition. The heatsink does come with replaceable thermal padding for the SSDs, which is also an important consideration as it’s possible to push four or eight SSDs to their limits simultaneously. The thermal padding can accommodate both single-sided, with K=3, and double-sided, with K=8, solid state drives, with different dimensions depending on if they are on the left or right side of the PCB. For proper operation with the included heatsink, the installed drives should be bare.

For our purposes, HighPoint sent us eight Samsung 990 Pro 2TB drive to use in testing. While it's possible to get even higher performance with PCIe 5.0 drives, even eight PCIe 4.0 drives can saturate the x16 interface when bursting data. The on-board switch provides a full 32 lanes of internal PCIe connectivity, but there's still only 16 lanes to the host system. PCIe 4.0 x4 links thus end up hitting the same theoretical 64 GB/s as the PCIe 5.0 x16 link.

The SSDs are arranged starting with port 1 at the upper left, while facing the front side of the card, then going in a counter-clockwise direction. The M.2 slots are toolless, using rubber retention clasps for installation. Drive status is tracked by eight LEDs on the externally exposed part of the AIC. There are also status and fault LEDs on this part of the card. The LEDs can be solid or may flash in different colors to communicate various drive and card condition information. An optional low-profile bracket is also included, according to the quick install guide.

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The main brain of the Rocket 1608A is the Broadcom PEX89048 PCIe switch, part of the PCIe 5.0 PEX89000 series. The “48” denotes the total number of lanes. 16 of these lanes are upstream lanes, from the card to the host system. The other 32 are downstream. As there are eight M.2 slots available, each one is capable of connecting four lanes at PCIe 5.0.

As noted above, this means it’s possible to reach the maximum amount of bandwidth with either four PCIe 5.0 SSDs, like the Crucial T700 or Crucial T705, or eight PCIe 4.0 SSDs, like the Samsung 990 Pro. HighPoint provided us with the latter configuration. It's possible to use different counts and types of drives, but mixing and matching different drive types could lead to less than optimal results.

Unlike older solutions from HighPoint that used the ARM Cortex-R4, an MCU that has been used on SSDs as well, the PEX89048 is using a dual-core ARM Cortex-A15 processor. This is much more powerful and that extra horsepower is needed for the full feature set from Broadcom, the manufacturer of said switch. The switch itself pulls a typical 23.7W but if you’re adding, say, eight Samsung 990 Pro SSDs, it’s clear how HighPoint came up with a number north of 80W. The fan is part of this draw, and it has its own 4-pin connection on the PCB for power supply.

PCIe switches, which are also used on motherboards for downstream ports, do add some latency that can impact 4KB performance to a small degree. Usually the latency addition is in the 100-150ns range, with the PEX89048 listed at 115ns, which compared to the relatively long flash access latencies — from tens to hundreds of microseconds — is pretty tiny. The platform being used will also influence performance results, with Intel generally having lower latency for 4KB and AMD providing more throughput for bigger I/O. That said, an HEDT configuration based on AMD hardware would be a good baseline for prosumer use.

HighPoint’s Rocket 1608A compatibility guide lists the ASUS ProArt X670E-Creator WIFI as one consumer option, but you would have to forego a discrete GPU for maximum performance. Other systems with previous PCIe generation slots will compromise on total bandwidth. In either case, to reach maximum performance and IOPS a fast CPU may be required.

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This hardware allows Broadcom to offer some extremely useful features, although these are largely optional and are of most benefit in an enterprise environment. One example that HighPoint lists is the field replacement unit (FRU) that contains the vital product data (VPD). Upon hardware failure, the FRU can be replaced with minimal downtime and a low risk of data loss, making it useful for mission-critical storage. HighPoint also touts the synthetic mode or synthetic hierarchy, which is when the switch acts like a host for I/O and resource allocation, allowing for more flexibility in storage topology and reducing server CPU overhead.

The PEX89000 series of switches has many other features that can be selectively exposed in products like HighPoint’s various AICs. Some of these are rather powerful, such as the built-in PCIe analyzer for interface diagnostics. Switching and port designation also allow for a lot of flexibility in how storage is accessed. More complex features make this hardware ideal for very large storage systems, used for example in AI applications, rather than making sense for a home rig. Check HighPoint’s and Broadcom’s sites for more information.

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