For those who truly need a lot of additional storage space and value extreme speed, the HighPoint RocketStor 6542AW is worth a closer look provided the necessary budget is available. This external NVMe storage solution offers nearly one petabyte (968 TB of storage) and achieves a speed of 28 GB/s via the special CDFP interface.
HighPoint RocketStor 6542AW
The heart of the RocketStor 6542AW consists of eight hot-plug-capable NVMe bays in the 2.5" format. However, these are not compatible with NVMe SSDs in the common consumer M.2 format, but only work with professional U.2 or U.3 drives.
HighPoint RocketStor 6542AW with Rocket 1544 PCI card with CDFP port
To achieve the maximum expansion level, HighPoint has equipped the system with eight Solidigm D5-P5336 NVMe-SSDs, each with 122 TB. These drives are based on 192-layer QLC-3D-NAND and use PCIe 4.0. Their sequential read rates are up to 7,400 MB/s, while write operations reach a maximum of 3,200 MB/s. In combination within a RAID array RAID 0, 1, and 10 are supported a transfer rate of up to 28 GB/s is achieved through parallel transmission.
Solidigm D5-P5336 NVMe-SSDs
To be able to use these speeds, however, a special connection to the host system is required. This is not done via USB or Thunderbolt, but via a CDFP port (Common Dual-Function Port), which is provided via an included PCIe 4.0 x16 card (Rocket 1544). This would even allow for an even higher bandwidth of up to 32 GB/s which the installed hardware does not fully utilize.
HighPoint RocketStor 6542AW
HighPoint targets the RocketStor 6542AW at application areas with extremely high demands on data throughput and capacity, such as film production or scientific simulations.
The mere HighPoint RocketStor 6542AW enclosure costs "only" around 2,400 euros. However, it becomes really expensive due to the 122 TB Solidigm D5-P5336 NVMe-SSDs, which cost 12,400 dollars each, i.e. a total of 99,200 dollars (converted to around 87,000 euros).
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