HighPoint Rocket 1608A PCIe Gen5 Eight Drive Switch

Put That PCIe 5.0 Slot To Work

The HighPoint Rocket 1608A is a drive switch card, which means that it lacks a fancy RAID controller and software required to set up drives in anything other than RAID 0 or RAID 1.  That does keep the price down, leaving you more money to buy up to eight NVMe drives to put in it.  While you will get the best performance from PCIe 5.0 drives it is compatible with PCIe 4.0 as well.  When properly set up, the Rocket 1608A has a theoretical bandwidth of 64GB/s which is a rather huge number.

The tests showed that the performance tops out with five drives installed, and depending on the test run the Rocket 1608A could match or come close to that theoretical performance.  In the real world, their 100GB data transfer test, a zip file with more than 62,000 files in it was copied over in 1.33 seconds.  It is an impressive beast and one well worth checking out.