HighPoint RocketAIC 7749M2W 128TB Review - World's Highest Capacity AIC Storage Device

TweakTown's Rating: 96%

The Bottom Line

HighPoint's RocketAIC SSD7749M2W 128TB Gen4 x16 RAID card delivers the best overall user experience for a storage device of its kind.

Pros

• + Compact design
• + Preconfigured
• + Drive accessibility
• + Runs cool
• + Performance

Cons

• - High queue depths required for maximum throughput

Should you buy it?

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Introduction & Drive Details

Having recently reviewed the world's fastest AIC SSD, the HighPoint Technologies Rocket 1608A 8-drive PCIe Gen5 AIC and being blown away with its awesomeness, we've acquired a taste for what HighPoint Technologies is cooking up.

HighPoint is, and has been for years, on the cutting edge of unique and transformational highspeed, high-capacity, solid-state storage. Always pushing the envelope of what's possible is what we've grown to admire about the Fremont California-based storage company. As we always do when making the rounds at Flash Memory Summit, we stopped by the HighPoint booth to see what they are up to. The SSD that immediately caught our attention is the one we have for review today. The HighPoint RocketAIC SSD7749M2W is preconfigured with 128TB capacity. The capacity reeled us right in as one would expect, but the unique design is what really had us fully captured:

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The drive is a dual-slot AIC roughly the same size as a dual-slot GPU. As is typical of HighPoint AIC SSDs, it requires an additional 6-pin VGA power connector. What makes this AIC so unique is its blade-like 8x dual-sided M.2 trays that slot in at the back of the card. These removable blade-like dual M.2 trays connect to the card via an EDSFF connection. This unique approach allows for easy tool-free drive removal and replacement. You've got to love that.

The 128TB model comes preconfigured with sixteen Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus 8TB SSDs:

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As you can imagine, this 128TB AIC SSD costs a pretty penny, with an MSRP of $25,999 USD. That's a lot of money, to be sure, but there are plenty out there chomping at the bit to buy it due to its unique characteristics.

Drive Details

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The RocketAIC 7749M2 is the first NVMe AIC drive to deliver 128TB of capacity via a single PCIe Gen4 x16 slot. The vertical SSD mounting system, its enclosed aluminum casing, and innovative three-pronged cooling system are all unique features among AIC SSDs.

HighPoint's RocketAIC 7749M2 incorporates the company-proven x48 lane PCIe switching technology, which allocates a dedicated x16 lanes of upstream bandwidth (PCIe connection to the host computing platform) and x2 lanes of dedicated downstream bandwidth to each of the drive's 16-Sabrent 8TB SSDs. This technology enables the 7749M2 to optimize signal integrity, reduce latency, and deliver, as we will demonstrate, up to 29,500 MB/s sequential throughput.

Okay, let's get into this review and see exactly what the HighPoint Rocket 7749M2W 128TB AIC SSD can do for you by the numbers, keeping in mind that it is a highly specialized product not intended to be used as a typical consumer storage device. It is intended for content creation applications where higher sequential throughput equals faster data processing. As such, this will be a standalone review without comparison products or charts. We will be testing the card on both our Intel and AMD test systems.

Jon's Test System Specifications

Intel Test System

• Motherboard: GIGABYTE AORUS Z790 Xtreme X
• CPU: Intel Core i9-14900KS - Buy from Amazon
• Cooler: Alphacool Eissturm Hurricane Copper 45 - Buy from Amazon
• RAM: Patriot Viper Xtreme 5 8000 48GB - Buy from Amazon
• Graphics Card: MSI SUPRIM X RTX 3080 12GB - Buy from Amazon
• Case: PrimoChill's Praxis Wetbench - Buy from Amazon
• Power Supply: be quiet! Dark Power Pro 12 1200W - Buy from Amazon
• OS: Microsoft Windows 11 Pro 64-bit - Buy from Amazon

AMD Test System

• Motherboard: GIGABYTE X670E AORUS Master
• CPU: AMD Ryzen 9 7950X - Buy from Amazon
• Cooler: Alphacool Eissturm Hurricane Copper 45 - Buy from Amazon
• RAM: Sabrent Rocket DDR5 32GB - Buy from Amazon
• Graphics Card: MSI SUPRIM X RTX 3080 12GB - Buy from Amazon
• Case: PrimoChill's Praxis Wetbench - Buy from Amazon
• Power Supply: be quiet! Dark Power Pro 12 1200W - Buy from Amazon
• OS: Microsoft Windows 11 Pro 64-bit - Buy from Amazon

Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus 8TB SSD

	Today	Yesterday	7 days ago	30 days ago
	$1159.50	$1159.99	$1188.98	$1198.99	Buy
* Prices last scanned on 10/4/2024 at 7:34 am CDT - prices may not be accurate, click links above for the latest price. We may earn an affiliate commission from any sales.

HighPoint RAID Management

HighPoint RocketAIC 7749M2W drives are available with 64TB or 128TB of pre-configured RAID storage. Out of the box, the drives are set up in RAID 0 striping mode to maximize storage performance and capacity. However, with HighPoint's browser-based RAID utility, users can easily reconfigure the drives into RAID 1 or RAID 10 arrays. Each RocketAIC 7749M2 SSD can support up to four RAID 0, 1, or 10 arrays.

The RAID utility works in conjunction with HighPoint's NVMe controller driver. You can get the driver and tool HERE. Additionally, the card can be used to host bootable operating systems or virtualization platforms if so desired.

For the purposes of this review, we chose RAID 0 with the default 512K block size, which will enable peak throughput. HighPoint's browser-based RAID tool is easy to use and works flawlessly. Our formatted RAID 0 volume yields 119,231 gigabytes available to the user.

Benchmarks: CDM, ATTO, Blackmagic, & Anvil

CrystalDiskMark

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MB/s - Intel at top / AMD below

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IOPS - Intel at top / AMD below

As these results demonstrate, the RocketAIC 7749M2 AIC is perfectly suited for a wide range of data-intensive applications such as Big-Data & Analytics, Research and Simulation, Deep Learning, ML and AI Model Training, media editing, and Enterprise backup and disaster recovery. And there you have it, 29,500 MB/s on Intel and 29,000 MB/s on AMD. Additionally, there is up to 2.6 million IOPS random performance on tap. Impressive.

ATTO

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Intel at top / AMD below

ATTO gives us a clear picture of what transfer sizes a particular SSD favors in terms of sequential throughput. Our test subject favors sequential transfers of 128KB or larger when serving data to the host (reading) and 1MB or larger when programming (writing) data. At over 27GB for both read and write, this is even better than we were able to extract from the Rocket 1608A 8-drive PCIe Gen5 AIC. Outstanding small file performance, which is exactly what we are looking for from any storage device.

Blackmagic

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Intel at top / AMD below

When programming (writing), we find our test subject delivering even more than we got from the Rocket 1608A 8-drive PCIe Gen5 AIC. Impressive.

Anvil's Storage Utilities

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Intel at top / AMD below

The previous record for a flash-based Gen4 AIC SSD was a total score of 51,837. At 63K, we feel the 7749M2W 128TB is punching above its weight, nearly on the level of the Rocket 1608A 8-drive PCIe Gen5 AIC.

Final Thoughts

HighPoint's innovation and performance prowess are on clear display with its RocketAIC 7749M2W 128TB SSD. Not only is it the highest capacity AIC of its kind, but we also find it to offer the best overall delivery mechanism for this level of throughput. The card itself is brilliantly designed, being sleek, cool-running, and well-proportioned. Its tool-free design is an absolute godsend, allowing you to easily access its 8x removable storage trays in seconds with zero frustration.

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HighPoint Technologies RocketAIC SSD7749M2W 128TB Gen4 x16 RAID card has delivered by far the best overall user experience for a storage device of its kind that we've experienced to date. Editor's choice.