At first, we would like to thank Sabrent for offering a sample of their Rocket Q4 NVMe PCIe 4.0 M.2 2280 2TB SSD for testing and reviewing.

 

 

 

About Sabrent:

 

“At Sabrent, we create products that help people realize the power of technology and make people’s lives easier and better.

We have a proven track record to consumers and distribution partners, who are part of the rapidly growing Sabrent family.

 

Deliver the latest technology at an affordable price.

offer a broad product selection, specializing in items that sell.

Maintain large inventory levels and provide same day shipping.

Attractive retail packaging.

Instant live customer service and technical support, including remote access sessions.

No-nonsense product exchanges.

 

Sabrent’s commitment is to offer the latest technology and the highest quality consumer electronic products at an affordable cost to everyone. Since its founding, Sabrent has consistently delivered to market a full line of computer peripherals and accessories that incorporate style, quality and the latest technologies available.”

 

When working at the latest SSD review projects, we were pleasantly surprised to be contacted by Sabrent, an American manufacturer of computer hardware since 1998! They are not only specialized in storage products but also lots of accessories such as USB Hubs, audio adapters, cables, tripods, HDD accessories, card readers and so on.

 

The product we are going to review in this article is the Rocket Q4 NVMe 4.0 SSD drive, from their High-Performance series (mainstream segment), which was shipped inside a very compact cardboard enclosure. The entire packaging is sealed inside a transparent plastic layer, for additional protection; on the top area we will also note that Sabrent advertises the very useful Acronis Software for cloning the old storage device:

 

 

 

Here is how the box does look with the plastic protective layer removed:

 

 

 

On the back side of the box, we will find another photo of the drive, along with the internal code name and its serial number:

 

 

 

After removing the top cardboard layer, we will note another enclosure made of aluminum, which shows Sabrent’s attention to detail!

 

 

 

The two halves are held together by a sticker on the side, with product photos and other info we have found previously as well:

 

 

 

 

 

A written installation guide can be found inside as well:

 

 

 

The actual drive is surrounded by protective material on the sides, but also on the top, so it won’t move during transit:

 

 

 

 

The guide will help people which have never installed such devices with the usual procedures:

 

 

 

Let’s remove the drive from the packaging and see what we have got!

 

 

 

The top area of the PCB is fully covered by a large sticker which holds the company logo, but also the drive capacity and supported bus. This is not a simple sticker, since underneath we will find a thin copper layer which helps with heat evacuation from the main controller during continuous writes:

 

 

 

On the back side, we will note an additional sticker but also a DDR IC:

 

 

 

After removing the top heatspreader, we will note the copper foil underneath:

 

 

 

A closer look at the PCB does reveal a central controller, a DRAM module for caching but also two NAND ICs:

 

 

 

The H5AN8G8NCJ DRAM from SK Hynix does offer 1GB of DDR4 2666MHz for storing the mapping tables:

 

 

 

Next, we will note the Rocket 4.0 PH-SBT-RKT-401 controller, which is a rebranded Phison PS5016-E16, one of the first PCIe 4.0 controllers of its kind. It comes with 8 channels and features two cores with CoXProcessor:

 

 

 

Next, we did find two IA7HG66AWA Micron 96-layer QLC NAND flash, each holding 512GB of storage:

 

 

 

On the back side we will find two more NAND ICs and a secondary DRAM cache chip of the same type, for a total cache of 2GB:

 

 

 

 

 

The drive looks great when installed into the system:

 

 

 

Test Bench:

The test system did incorporate a Ryzen 5 5600X 6-core CPU, two Trident Z RGB 3200MHz 8GB memory modules with 16-18-18-38 XMP 2.0 timings, a PowerColor Red Dragon Radeon RX 5700 video card but also a Patriot Memory Viper VP4100 PCIe 4.0 SSD ; all these were connected to the BIOSTAR B550GTA motherboard. As a power supply we have chosen a Cooler Master 850W non-modular and the system was running the latest Windows 10 OS build as well.

The drive has arrived unformatted, but for testing purposes, we have formatted it NTFS:

 

 

With the help of AIDA64, we could extract more information regarding the drive:

 

 

 

The Tests

 

3DMark

Quick System Drive Benchmark

 

 

CrystalMark HDD Test Suite

 

AIDA64 Disk Test Suite

 

CrystalDisk Test Suite (Random)

 

HDTune Test Suite

Blank SSD

 

PCMark Vantage HDD Test Suite

 

Anvil [Read]

Anvil [Write]

PCMark 10

Quick System Drive Benchmark

 

Extra Tests:

 

AS SSD Benchmark

 

AS SSD Benchmark (IOPS)

Blank SSD

ATTO Disk Benchmark

Blank SSD

 

Before transferring data to the drive in order to perform the second test stage, we checked the IDLE temperature, which is great:

 

 

 

The data transfer has started at high, optimal speed:

 

 

 

The drive temperature started raising little by little:

 

 

 

 

More than 220GB of data was written to the drive and we have not detected any drop in performance:

 

 

 

First drop has occurred after writing about 340GB to the drive:

 

 

 

During this time, the controller temp has reached 70 degrees Celsius, well within safe limits:

 

 

 

After a short while, the drive did succeed to recover, but not at the same speed, a sign that it was remaining out of SLC cache:

 

 

 

The drive temps were fine as well:

 

 

 

The drive started to lose performance gradually after having about 480 GB of data written:

 

 

 

 

The drive then had a fluctuating transfer speed, between 55MB/s and 150MB/s:

 

 

 

 

During direct write to QLC, the controller temperature dropped to 65 degrees Celsius and remained there!

 

 

 

The rest of the data was written at a similar, slower transfer speed, the drive continuing to write directly to the slow portion, QLC:

 

 

 

 

We did not notice any more changes in the controller temperature:

 

 

 

The Tests

 

3DMark

Quick System Drive Benchmark

 

 

CrystalMark HDD Test Suite

 

AIDA64 Disk Test Suite

 

CrystalDisk Test Suite (Random)

 

HDTune Test Suite

Filled SSD

 

PCMark Vantage HDD Test Suite

 

Anvil [Read]

Anvil [Write]

PCMark 10

Quick System Drive Benchmark

 

Extra Tests:

 

AS SSD Benchmark

Filled SSD

AS SSD Benchmark (IOPS)

Filled SSD

ATTO Disk Benchmark

Filled SSD

 

The Sabrent Rocket Q4 2TB drive performs well for a QLC drive, a type of NAND flash mainly user with entry-level and mainstream SSD offerings. The Phison PS5016-E16 controller is making a great pair with Micron’s 96-layer QLC, resulting in it trading punches with the previous mainstream PCIe 4.0 drives we have previously tested. The drive could sustain high performance for quite a bit, but the behavior is quite different versus TLC NAND when SLC cache is exhausted, resulting quite low writes between 50 and 150MB/s, depending on the current cache state.

 

A clear representation regarding what happens when the SLC is filled up can be found when running HD Tune Pro write workload. The drive will recover for a bit once but if we do keep hammering it with data, it will eventually only write to the slow area of the NAND Flash:

 

 

 

In terms of temperatures, the drive performs well in well ventilated environments and we haven’t noted throttling. However, if this is not the case for you and the enclosure features a less-than-ideal airflow, Sabrent has you covered by providing an additional heatsink.

 

The drive can be picked up from Newegg.com for about $219.99 . It needs to drop a bit in price in order to recommend it for a Value award, because some TLC drives can be found in that segment as well and come with more data endurance (1400TBW Neo Forza NFP425 vs 400TBW on the Rocket Q4)

 

Sabrent Rocket Q4 NVMe PCIe 4.0 M.2 2280 2TB SSD is Recommended for:

 

 

 

We would like to thank again to Sabrent for making this review possible!