RAID card delivers impressive speeds up to 56 GB/s — throughput possible with four PCIe 5.0 SSDs or eight PCIe 4.0 SSDs

Those searching for higher performance than the best SSDs can offer may be interested in hearing about HighPoint unveiling the brand’s latest RAID controller card, the HighPoint Rocket 1608A. The HighPoint Rocket 1608A is a hardware RAID card that leverages eight PCIe 5.0 / PCIe 4.0 x4 slots (only four full-speed drives can be used at a time if Gen 5), all controlled by a Broadcom PEX89048 chip to drive up to 56 GB/s throughput.

According to Broadcom, the PEX89048 chip is a “48-lane, 48-port, PCI Express Gen 5.0 ExpressFabric Platform.” ExpressFabric refers to the technology used to allow for rapid PCIe switching between otherwise standard NVMe drives, making speeds like this possible in a RAID 0 configuration. It is how you’re achieving NVMe speeds faster than individual drives with the help of this RAID controller card.

HighPoint’s NVME switching technology is currently achieving roughly 56 GB/s of PCIe Gen 5’s theoretical maximum of 64 GB/s. According to their official Switching Technology page, this is because PCIe Gen 5 devices are “more sensitive to signal degradation,” which is worsened by limited PCIe lanes and the best signal/stability being reserved for GPUs.

Further claims on HighPoint’s page point toward their technology and the onboard Broadcom ExpressFabric chip, which is used to maintain signal integrity and low latency across all drives installed within these hardware RAID arrays.

Overall, this latest HighPoint offering does seem like it may be interesting— though it isn’t that much better than its prior best 55 GB/s showing in 2022. Solutions like GraidTech’s SupremeRAID cards— “GPU RAID”— may achieve even faster speeds of up to 80 GB/s. It’s worth noting that most of these hardware RAID solutions— especially SupremeRAID— seem to be focused on improving RAID array speed and throughput, with minimal, if any, focus on enhancing RAID stability or redundancy.

It’s still impressive that there are solutions capable of taking the modern-day blazing-fast SSDs and making them even faster, though. Our current top PCIe 5.0 drive, the Crucial T705 2TB, tops out at 14.5 GB/s in read speeds for your reference against  HighPoint’s 56 GB/s showing and SupremeRAID’s 80 GB/s.