Add-in card manufacturer HighPoint has unveiled the world's first PCIe Gen 5 x16 NVMe add-in card, which can house up to eight PCIe Gen 5 SSDs at full speed. The card, priced at $1,999.00, can operate at up to 56 GB/s and is compatible with up to 2PB of NVMe drives.
The new add-in card, the Rocket 7608A PCIe Gen 5 x16, features eight Gen 5 2280 compatible M.2 slots capable of operating a four-lane Gen 5 NVMe SSD at full speed. The card utilizes Broadcom's PEX89048 switch to provide 48 lanes of internal Gen 5 bandwidth, with 16 lanes dedicated to the host machine (the physical x16 slot) and the rest to the eight M.2 slots. The 7608A's dimensions resemble a single-slot graphics card, featuring a single-slot full-height form factor with a massive amount of width to accommodate all eight SSDs.
The Rocket 7608A is compatible with various RAID configurations and capable of true NVMe hot plug and hot swap support. In-use NVMe drives can be ejected and replaced at will without shutting down the system. RAID configurations can also be moved from one add-in card to another, enabling users to move RAID arrays to other cards without configuration work.
For cooling, the Rocket 7608A has a full-length aluminum heatsink featuring copper SSD contacts and two layers of thermal padding to ensure all eight drives don't overheat when operating at full tilt. The full-length heatsink is paired with a single large fan that draws fresh air in and dissipates it over the entire heatsink, cooling off any heat that has made its way from the SSDs to the heatsink.
The 8-slot add-in card can be used with HighPoints Storage Health Inspector software, which allows users to track the temperature of all the drives hooked up to the card and control the fan speed of the single cooling fan on the card. The HighPoints software solution also gives users complete control over the card, including RAID configurations and sensor logging, which can provide temperature, fan speed, and power consumption of each SSD.
As mentioned, the Rocket 7628A is now available at an MSRP of $1,999.00.
