Introduction

HighPoint Technologies is a vendor of storage solutions that has been in the market for almost 30 years. Their core products are a wide range of storage controller add-in cards that provide options to expand capacity, performance, or both. Their portfolio has products with NVMe, SAS, SATA, USB, and Thunderbolt, targeted at servers, high-end workstations and desktop platforms.



Storage has seen dramatic performance improvements in recent years. We moved from mechanical HDDs to SATA SSDs and PCI-Express M.2 drives. Thanks to the PCI-Express 5.0 interface, modern SSDs are now reaching well over 10 GB/s—an almost x100 speed increase over hard drives. While transfer rates and capacities have improved, the number of drives supported has gone down. Even modern desktop PCs typically support just a single PCIe Gen 5 SSD natively, the other slots are PCIe 4.0, and you only have a handful of M.2 slots available, whereas the number of SATA ports is usually six or more.

HighPoint's Rocket 1608A storage controller addresses these shortcomings. The adapter card is a PCI-Express 5.0 x16 board with support for up to eight (!) drives—each having its own PCI-Express 5.0 x4 uplink. In the past we've seen several controller cards that rely on the motherboard's PCI-Express bifurcation capability to split a x16 port into four x4 links. The R1608A is different, it comes with its own PCI-Express 5.0 bridge chip on the PCB, meaning that it does not require any special motherboard support to operate. The bridge chip is a Broadcom PEX89048 switch, which supports a total of 48 PCIe Gen 5 lanes. Of those 48 lanes, 16 are allocated to connect the card to the CPU, the remaining 32 lanes are split into eight groups of four, one for each M.2 NVMe slot.

Eight PCIe Gen 5 drives can put out around 100 W of heat when fully loaded, so HighPoint includes a big aluminium heatsink with their card. Power is delivered through the PCIe slot and an additional 6-pin PCIe connection, which brings the total power delivery capability to 150 W—plenty, even when running in a fully loaded configuration.

Today's review covers the Rocket 1608A, in the near-future, HighPoint will also offer the Rocket 7608A, which expands the capabilities of the R1608A with dedicated RAID support together with advanced monitoring and control options, including fan control and OPAL encryption support.

HighPoint is pricing their Rocket 1608A adapter card at $1500, the warranty is two years.

Packaging

The Drive

The Rocket 1608A is a full-size PCI-Express add-in-board that measures 28 x 10 cm.


As mentioned before, the host-interface uses a PCI-Express 5.0 x16 connection that supports running without bifurcation support from the motherboard.


The card is a single-slot design, width is just 20 mm.


The slot cover has eight LEDs to show the connection/busy status of each drive. An additional two LEDs are used to indicate the PCIe bus width/speed and error condition. Note the blue LED, this notes "x16 5.0."


A single 6-pin power input is used to provide power for the SSDs. Combined with the slot, this brings the maximum power delivery capability to 150 W, which is plenty, even for eight Gen 5 drives and the Broadcom bridge chip.


Six standard screws hold the AIB together.


Once the cooler is removed, we get our first look at the adapter card's PCB.


Several thermal pads on the heatsink ensure good heat transfer. Spare pads are included.


Nice engineering! The fan is connected using this pin type connection, which ensures you don't have to mess around with a fan cable and connector.


Each M.2 slot has one of these little rubber caps to hold the drive in place. To me, they felt a bit cumbersome to use, I'd definitely have preferred screws or some kind of tool-free locking mechanism like on modern motherboards.


Here's the adapter card filled up with eight PCI-Express Gen 5 drives—sexy!


This is the heart of the R1608A, a Broadcom PEX89048 controller PCI-Express switch, providing 48 lanes of PCIe Gen 5. Of those, 16 go to the host CPU, and each M.2 slot gets four full Gen 5 lanes, so each drive can run at maximum speed. Do note that all PCIe switches add a little bit of latency, according to Broadcom the added latency is less than 115 nanoseconds.