RocketU 1444C: A True Alternative to Thunderbolt™ 3 Connectivity

The RocketU 1444C is the first commercially available USB HBA that is capable of functioning as a true Thunderbolt™ 3 replacement. Although each USB port is slightly slower than a Thunderbolt™ 3 port (up to 2,500 MB/s vs. approximately 2,800MB/s), each of the RocketU 1444C’s ports can operate simultaneously!

While it is true that Thunderbolt™ 3 is nothing to sneeze at, many do not realize that only a portion of the 40Gb/s bandwidth is available to storage devices.

A single Thunderbolt™ 3 controller can allocate up to 2.8Gb/s of usable transfer bandwidth to storage media. However there is a major potential bottleneck to consider; many if not most Thunderbolt™ 3 capable host platforms only provide a single Thunderbolt™ 3 controller. This is also true for the majority of Thunderbolt™ 3 AIC’s (add-in cards), hubs and PCIe expansion devices. If you need a device or platform capable of providing four dedicated TB3 controllers, it will not come cheap.

The RocketU 1444C on the other hand, provides four dedicated USB 3.2 controllers via a single PCIe 3.0 host connection. Each port is 100% independent, and can operate at 2,500MB/s 100% of the time (10,000MB/s total bandwidth).

This is due to the controller’s unique “Per-Port Performance” architecture.

Essentially, the controller design assigns a dedicated USB controller to each USB port (the controllers are highlighted blue, above). Combine this with our controller’s generous PCIe bus bandwidth (PCIe 3.0 x16 in the case of the RocketU 1444C), and it’s clear how our Rocket U HBA’s are capable of living up to their performance claims.