The truth is that few people today use expansion cards in the PC beyond the dedicated graphics card, since generally with what the motherboard itself is supplied we cover most of the needs. However, the manufacturer High point has just announced the launch of a SSD adapter which offers astronomical figures, since it supports up to 2 petabytes capacity and offers a speed of up to 56 GB/sfor users who simply need MORE.
Generally speaking and with the exception of graphics cards, expansion cards are pretty dead in the PC ecosystem… sound card, network card, SSD slots… modern motherboards cover all these aspects, and the normal thing is that adding a graphics card is enough, at least for the average user. However, there are always users who simply need something more or better, and for them it is this new SSD adapter.
The SSD adapter that turns your PC into a beast
The HighPoint adapter is capable of hosting up to 8 SSD units in M.2 2280 format, and the numbers it presents are astronomical. Added to the capacity of the installed SSDs, it is capable of managing up to 2 Petabytes of storage, which corresponds to 2048 TB of capacity; Obviously there is no SSD at the moment that, even multiplied by 8, offers us such a storage capacity, but hey, the adapter supports it and that doesn’t mean anything.
Named Rocket 7608A, this expansion card uses a PCIe 5.0 x16 interface (just like modern graphics cards), and as we said, up to 8 PCIe 5.0 SSDs in M.2 2280 format can be mounted inside, offering maximum speed. It has a Broadcom PEX89048 controller with 48 PCIe lanes, 16 of which are dedicated to the host (the PCIe 5.0 x16 physical interface) and the rest to SSDs.
As you can see, it’s roughly the size of a graphics card, but only takes up one slot wide. It has a passive heatsink that covers its entire surface and an active fan to cool both the Broadcom controller and the eight SSDs installed inside. As you can see, it needs an additional 6-pin PCIe power connector to work.
The HighPoint Rocket 7608A supports a variety of RAID configurations, so you can have all SSDs in JBOD mode for maximum capacity, in RAID 5 for failsafe, or you can even configure RAID 0 for increased speed. In any case, its interface is capable of delivering performance of up to 56GB/s, which is truly astonishing. Oh, and by the way, while it would be strange if you decided to swap SSDs while the computer is running, you actually could, since it supports hot-plugging.
Pricing and Availability
While this news is more out of curiosity than anything else, you might be interested to know that HighPoint has already released this SSD adapter at a suggested price of $1,999, which is really out of the budget of most users. It’s really geared more towards servers and data centers.
