Highpoint RocketStor 6661A Thunderbolt 3 to PCIe 3.0 Expansion Chassis

Setup: * 27" iMac 5k with TB2 ports. * HighPoint RocketStor 6661A * Third party PCIe to NVME adapter * Generic 1TB NVME & SSD in a USB 3.0 case (for APFS Fusion) Some Pros: Quiet or the fans don't work. Solid build. Easy to get into the device. Discreet. No crazy vibrations. (I don't like fan or drive vibrations) Cons: No On/Off switch. These devices (external chassis) still have a low adoption and the information out there only focuses on graphics. The one that did focus on NVME did not cover this information. Now for the TL;DR user experience: I wanted to future proof myself with a Thunderbolt 3 expansion to use with my 27" iMac 5k (late 2015). I was very nervous at first since the device had poor reviews. I've had it for 2 weeks now and it's had there has been a fair share of issues but I wouldn't say all of them are Highpoint's fault. I used the Apple TB3 (USB-C) to TB2 adapter to get this to work on my iMac with TB2. I placed a Vantec PCIe card in the enclosure and used a generic 256GB Inland Professional NVME I took out of my Windows box. At this point, I had a secondary SSD in a TB2 dock form a different Vendor. My first step was to even see if macOS saw the device. When I first turned it on, it did not recognize or power up. I was starting to get nervous. For some reason it did not like the Apple TB2 cable. I swapped it out with a 3rd party TB2 cable that I previously purchased. Voila. There's the device. I reformatted macOS and set it up to use the combined 480GB OCZ SSD w/ 256Gb Inland NVME. This setup worked like a charm but it had issues returning from sleep. This is apparently a known issue on a lot of devices. It's not just Highpoint. I got around this by turning off certain power settings such as auto shutoff, standby, and hibernation modes using pmset. Now It was working brilliantly. However, the NVME was only 256GB and I wanted more... I decided to take the TB2 dock back and buy a 1TB NVME instead. The original OCZ 470GB SSD was using USB 3.0 and I wanted to try the TB2 dock. I couldn't afford both the dock and the enclosure though. Now to get macOS on a new APFS Fusion drive using the 1TB NVME plus the OCZ SSD (now in a USB 3.0 enclosure). That's when all the troubles started. The fusion was created automatically and set the 1TB to the "main" device and the 480GB to the "Secondary (Aux" device. (Personally I wish APFS could span drives or use JBOD similar to Windows Storage Spaces. Right now it defaults to Fusion.) Over the next few days, I would have to unplug the Highpoint, cross my fingers, and hope I could option boot and see the drive during selection. Otherwise I'd get the folder with the blinking question mark or have to reset PRAM. Being an old timer Mac guy, I remembered that Macs would scan ports in a specific order during boot time. This apparently never changed from the old SCSI days. I started wondering if the Thunderbolt is last on the chain. I checked disk utility and found the synthesized APFS fusion drive was showing up as USB. Below that was the container and volume. Each were showing up as PCIe. I knew that had to be an issue. Apparently, it was scanning the USB device first before getting to the TB3 device and that in turn led to the question mark. It couldn't find the system on the USB device because the system resided on the NVME. I reformatted and reinstalled but it always showed up the same. You are probably wondering why even set it up that way. Well even with TB2, NVME, and a USB SSD, I was getting ~1200MB/s write and ~1400MB/s read. Together they made up 1.5TB of solid state love. That's a lot of space. What can I say? I am a glutton for space (punishment). Unfortunately, I had to redo the whole installation and manually create the APFS fusion drive so that the slower 480GB SSD was the "main" device and the 1TB NVME was the secondary (Aux) device. Voila! Now it boots up fine. It still doesn't respond to sleep well. That's a known issue though. It's not just Highpoint and I *did* use a generic NVME. (Inland Premium without firmware patches) Is it fast? Not as fast as the original setup but that's only when benchmarking. It's fast when booting up. When starting apps, I get about one bounce. Sometimes no bounce. So yeah. That's fast. Plus maybe it's better to have the secondary drive this way to prevent overall wear on that drive. I will report back in about a month. Fingers crossed.

This is a review for the bare case to which you can add a PCIe card of your choice. For example, I use it for my Myricom SFP+ 10GbE network adapter. In order for a PCIe-card of your choice to work, it needs to be Thunderbolt-aware and not draw more than about 45W. The two internal fans keep the card cool (many competing products only use one fan) and the case is spacious enough to accept cards up to 8.2" long @ full height. The case is solid extruded Aluminum, clear-coated to a finish similar to the 2010-era Power Macs. There is one open standard PCIe slot (x4 3.0) and enough room between the slot and the thunderbolt interface to accommodate a pretty wide variety of cards. This means you can attach cards that have more PCIe lanes (x8 or x16, for example) but the cards will only function at x4 speeds, which is allegedly good for 4GB/s raw throughput. Many folk are happy at those speeds with current eGPUs and that's about 3x what my network card can theoretically handle. I would not attempt a eGPU rig with this unit unless you're willing to either tone down the power needs significantly and/or make significant modifications. For example, the OEM power supply is only good for about 60W (12VDC @ 5A), which isn't going to get you very far. Similarly, while the OEM cooling will work just fine for a network card, SAS controller, etc., I doubt it will suffice for a graphics rig under intense load. It would be great if Highpoint allowed the customer to easily mount this case horizontally. The fans are also little buzzy and hence I may elect to replace them with Noctua models in the future. Thankfully, there are standard pin headers for the the fans on the inside, so the swap is easy. Compared to competing products, this case is longer, narrower, and less expensive. EDIT on Nov. 9, 2018: Too bad. As of today, the unit is no longer functioning. The lights come on, the fans start spinning, then the power cuts and the cycle repeats. I doubt it's the external power supply (which was easy to test, but then again, it wasn't under load). I've contacted Highpoint to get a replacement / repair. However, less than a months worth of occasional use shouldn't cause a unit to fail. After some back and forth, a RMA was authorized, I sent in my unit in, and eventually a replacement was sent to me. The replacement has been working fine since. By now there are better options re network adapters than combining this enclosure with a PCIe card. However, it’s a workable solution and I really like how the unit only comes on whenever it is plugged into a active thunderbolt bus.

Purchased and initially worked, but when using again later it no longer powers up. Too bad I only use intermittently, found out didn't work again outside of return window. For a pricey item like this go with another manufacturer, this one was a waste of 200 dollars...

I bought this enclosure to run an external capture card on my Lenovo legion 7i Gen 6 laptop. I was hoping to use it with a Datapath e1s but I could not get the enclosure to show up in the device manager with the e1s inserted. I then swapped my Avermedia Live Gamer 4K into the enclosure thinking it may be a compatibility issue and the live gamer 4K actually did show up in my device manager. After installing the drivers and running the stress test in RECcentral I found out the card was only running at 10.6gbps and would not capture 4K 60 or 2k 120 at full 4:4:4 RGB24 chroma sub sampling. The advertised speed of the enclosure is PCIE 3.0 x16 witch is 16gbps. This also explains why the E1s would not work. In my experience the e1s requires full lane support even though it only transfers data at a maximum of 650MBps. Bottom line If you require full PCIE 3.0 x16 speed I cannot recommend this enclosure. To be clear this may still fully function with the Elgato 4k60 Pro as it may require less bandwidth but I do not have one to test with so I cannot speak on that. Sadly I will be returning this. The price was right, the build quality seemed good and the small form factor would have worked extremely well for my needs, but the lack of full PCIE 3.0 x16 support was a complete deal killer for both the Avermedia live gamer 4k and Datapath e1s

So I actually came across this device from one of Egato's official videos talking about how to use this setup with their capture card for a dual PC setup utilizing a gaming laptop and a gaming desktop. My desktop handles the games, and then sends everything over to my gaming laptop. Luckily my laptop supports Thunderbolt 3 and as such, I was able to install my 4k60Pro Mk.II into it without issue. Once the power adapter is plugged in and the thunderbolt cable is connected to the laptop, everything just works. Be aware though, you need both power and thunderbolt for this to operate. I figured my card could get power from the thunderbolt only without the need for the power adapter but it doesn't work that way. I would also recommend getting a better thunderbolt cable then what is supplied just because the one that comes with it is rather short. I picked up a 3 foot cord and its perfect now. I also wish there was a way to disable the blue light without physically breaking the light or the connection to the light but there is no on/off switch. It isn't super bright, but id really rather not have it on all the time. Only other small complaint I can think of is that the tiny little fans they use in the case can be a bit noisy, but with all my other fan sounds going on, I can barely here it over the desktop and laptop anyways, so meh.

1-Size is compact , quality built is very good (actually is rugged with thick alumonimum , i hope it's ligher and thinner alumonim. 2-Tested with Telephony cards like sangoma , synway , dialogic , voice modems (via PCIe-to PCI converter) and it works. 3-Tested with graphics GT 1030 it works very will . 4-I have used it as Express card to TB3 converter using startech PCIe to express card adaptor (PEX2ECDP) and it works very will .

The chassis with no cards in it requires no drivers to be recognized by macOS Catalina. Runs quiet, but not silent as it has two 40mm fans. Solid construction and uncomplicated. Running macOS Catalina version 10.15.6 via on a Micron 9300 MAX 6.4TB U.2 SSD on my my iMac (Retina 5K, 27-inch, 2017) 3.4 GHz Quad-Core Intel Core i5, via the Highpoint RocketStor 6661A Thunderbolt 3 to PCIe 3.0 X16 Expansion Chassis and a StarTech.com U.2 to PCIe Adapter - x4 PCIe - For 2.5" U.2 NVMe SSD - SFF-8639 PCIe Adapter - U.2 SSD - PCIe SSD - U.2 drive (PEX4SFF8639).

You will have your pcie card enclosed in a thick, heavy, and well surface-processed aluminum chassis with perfect heat dissipation. One of the things I can't buy in is the fan design. The two small fans are installed on the internal metal frame, not on the inside face of external chassis. It may make the installation less error prone, but the side effect is... it turns the enclosure to a resonance box ( think about the cellos). The noise then gets amplified to be like a powerful CPU fan running at full speed, with even higher pitch. After some experiments, I found that the fans themselves are actually unnecessary in such design. The power supply shipped is rated 12V 5A, so the max heat capacity of the whole system is no more than 60w. The TB3 chip won't make much heat. Then we have several cases to discuss: 1. For those cards less than 5w: They even cannot heat up themselves. So no fan is needed. 2. For those cards in 5-15w. They are hot and will have a heat sink installed. My experiment with one of such card provides that, even without fan in enclosure, the card can still work normally with chip temp <180F. (Modern commercial semiconductor can run around 200F). In these cases I'd leave the fan unplugged. 3. For those card in 15-30W. They generally have fan installed. My experiment with a low-end video card fall in this range gives out 185F without enclosure fan. The fan on the pcie card is running at 70%, but given the better build (it's pulled from certified workstation), and a position which doesn't trigger resonate, they sound much acceptable. 4. For those card with more than 30w: If they still stick on single-slot design, they generally have meshed panel with turbo fan exporting heated air directly through it. So they will take care of their own air flow fine. The enclosure fans are not needed either. There are some exceptions. Some devices, even when run in low watts, may be hot due to the board design, and adjust their performance based on the temperature. The NVME drives are one of them. If you want no noise while require unthrottled performance, go grab some heat sink on it. You only need to cover the controller part. Even a tiny one with 1/2 x 1/2 x 1/4 will do the work very well. Remember not to fix them with the rubber band (most of the design sold here are with them), since they will eventually break in high temp, and eject the metal heat sink to some key naked circuits nearby.