By HighPoint’s 7604A, a four-slot, PCIe 5.0 x16, NVMe extension card, is the best option if you want up to 32TB of lightning-fast storage. It is an excellent method to increase your PCIe 5.0 M count and can transfer data at up to 50GBps in RAID 0. Most motherboards have two slots instead of just one.
However, in order to benefit from RAID performance, you need software that can direct I/O, and the 7604A is expensive—it will cost you a cool $1,000. It was listed for an outrageous $2,000 when I began this review, if that scares you. Even if the business has returned to low Earth orbit, most people wouldn’t consider it an impulsive purchase.
Features of the 7604A
The 7406A is a PCIe 5.0 x16 card that has four x4 NVMe M.2 slots, as was previously mentioned. You get the maximum bandwidth from every SSD on the card because each slot has four lanes, unlike many less expensive cards that have four or eight lanes divided up.
Theoretically, RAID 0 throughput can reach 56GBps. The 7604A can come close to that, depending on your setup. Yowser!
The 7604A is well-built, as you can see above (and below with the heatsink/fan turned on). The endplate’s status LEDs are not visible. These give information about the card’s condition. Additionally, if you attempt to operate the 7640A without the heatsink/fan, it will yelp (a loud beep) at you. You may probably imagine how I learned that specific fact.
The 7604A can operate in several RAID modes (0, 1, 5, 10) or as four separate full-bandwidth x4 PCIe 5.0 M.2 slots. In addition to being hardware, the RAID is reliant on the HighPoint driver, the organization’s configuration, and monitoring software. That is, neither jumpers nor dip switches are present.
The configuration program functions fairly well, and the driver was incredibly reliable. Because the admin interface is HTML-based, it opens in your web browser and reacts to commands a little slowly. I, too, received a can’t connect ” error, which meant I had to reload the page a few times before the interface showed up. Undoubtedly, communications lag.
Before attempting to construct an array or otherwise configure the card, familiarize yourself with the ideas of RAID, as the configuration interface is somewhat geeky in both language and concepts.
If you just want to add four x4 M.2 NVMe ports to your system, you don’t need the driver or configuration software. When you insert the filled-in 7604A into an x16 PCIe 5.0 slot, the drives will just show up under disk management, where you can properly initialize and format them.
