HighPoint RocketStor RS6114V 4-Bay USB-C RAID Enclosure Review

​Miscellaneous Aspects and Concluding Remarks

The RS6114V allows for hot-swapping of drives. That essentially means that the unit is able to tolerate sudden failure of one of the drives, and also rebuilds automatically once a new drive of equal or large capacity replaces the failed drive. We tested this aspect by hashing the contents of a folder in a RAID 5 volume (4x Crucial MX200 500GB) and yanking out one of the drives during the operation. There was an immediate queuing up of SATA commands to the volume, but the unit soon recovered and resumed servicing the requests.

A similar delay in request servicing was observed when a fresh drive was inserted to replaced the yanked out drive. That said, the volume remained online throughout.

RAID Rebuild

Rebuild was evaluated by using another Crucial MX200 500GB SSD to replace the one that was yanked out. The progress was monitored via the web UI We tracked the power consumption at the wall during the process.

The rebuild process for a RAID 5 volume took more than 3 hours for a 1.4TB volume. We started a similar experiment for a 4x 10TB RAID 5 volume, and the estimated rebuild time was around 84 hours. In any case, the rebuild process is software-based, and the numbers are heavily reliant on the capabilities of the host system.

TRIM Support

Storage bridges that support UASP fully can translate the SCSI UNMAP command to TRIM commands for SSDs connected to the downstream port. Checking for TRIM support has been a bit tricky so far. CyberShadow's trimcheck is a quick tool to get the status of TRIM support. However, it presents a couple of challenges: it sometimes returns INDETERMINATE after processing, and, in case TRIM comes back as NOT WORKING or not kicked in yet, it is not clear whether the blame lies with the OS / file system or the storage controller / bridge chip or the SSD itself. In order to get a clear idea, our TRIM check routine adopts the following strategy:

• Format the RAID volume in NTFS
• Load the trimcheck program into it and execute
• Use the PowerShell command Optimize-Volume -DriveLetter Z -ReTrim -Verbose (assuming that the drive connected to the storage bridge is mounted with the drive letter Z)
• Re-execute trimcheck to determine status report

Conclusions can be made based on the results from the last two steps.

Unfortunately, the RS6114V does not support TRIM passthrough.

Final Words

The HighPoint RS6114V is a solid 4-bay direct-attached storage unit. The enclosure's industrial design is pleasing to the eye. Despite its prosumer focus, the RAID management is novice-friendly. At the same time, it provides plenty of configuration options for the RAID volumes. The performance numbers are a tad disappointing, with the unit being unable to take full advantage of the USB 3.1 Gen 2 interface. That said, for its price point and feature set, it is difficult to find a comparable unit. 4-bay enclosures with higher performance numbers (such as the Akitio Thunder 3 Quad with software RAID or the HighPoint RocketStor 6314A with hardware RAID are Thunderbolt-based and priced significantly higher.

​The HighPoint RocketStor RS6114V is available on Amazon for $300. The closest competitor in terms of feature set is the Akitio Thunder 3 Quad for $380. The Akitio unit is capable of much better performance due to its Thunderbolt interface, but, it is incompatible with traditional USB ports and lacks the software RAID stack that makes the RS6114V an attractive option. Considering these factors, the RS6114V appears to provide good value for money.