Sabrent Rocket Q 8TB SSD Review – All the Storage One Might Need

It is not often that a new SSD company makes such an impact in today’s technology world, especially when it comes to SSDs. Sabrent has.  As much as SSD companies have come and gone, those that own the fabs have had the biggest advantage as they not only control flash pricing, but also, its availability.  To clarify, a fab is a silicon wafer manufacturing facility and silicon is the purest substance on earth, a necessity in the process of making computer chips and circuits.  Without it, our world couldn’t exist as it does now.  Silicon is the second most common element in the universe and is found in sand.  It is the purest and, in the manufacturing of silicon wafers (or flash) , a simple piece of dust or human hair can cost millions of dollars in damage to a company.   This Intel article called, ‘From Sand to Circuits‘ is a very interesting (and short) explanation.

I apologize for wandering but the inception of flash and the flash industry is probably one of the biggest things that we encounter daily in our lives, and most would never know it. Banking. Weather. Transportation. Media. You name it. Everything electronic we do has some connection to flash.  Getting back,  flash manufacturers like Samsung, Intel/Micron, Toshiba, WD/SanDisk, and SKHynix have the biggest advantage in SSD production because they build and control the most important element, flash memory chips.

Where third party companies (companies that have to buy the flash) have dropped significantly throughout the years simply because their costs in buying flash couldn’t match sales profit, a few have survived. Kingston.  ADATA.  OWC.  Corsair. PNY. Patriot. These companies, for the most part, rely on nameless SSD  assembly companies like Avant hidden in the background.  And then there is Sabrent.  They literally came out of nowhere.  They took a chance and made available to the consumer products that even Samsung, Intel and Crucial/Micron wouldn’t dare. Our report today will look at perhaps one of their newest and most popular examples of this, the Sabrent 8TB Rocket Q NVMe M.2 SSD.

8TB of data…on this Sabrent Rocket Q 8TB M.2 NVMe SSD.  Consider that for a second.  On a storage device, the size of a stick of gum, you could store 48 million pages of document…or more than a typical library stores.  They say the US Library of congress contains about 20TB of data, or less than three of these Sabrent SSDs.  8TB allows you to store 136,000 hours of music or 2.4 million photographs taken with a 12MP camera…or 4000 hours of HD  movies.  It was once estimated that Netflix USA contained 4000 movies.  At less than two hours per movie, two Sabrent NVMe SSDs might just store all of Netflix USA.  Consider that…all on a Sabrent 8TB SSD the size of a Juicy Fruit stick of gum and weighing roughly the same as a quarter…all because of beach sand grown (or melted) into silicon at 3,200 degrees Fahrenheit, and manufactured into flash.

Looking back just a bit, we were the first to report and review on 4/8TB SSDs back in 2015 when we reviewed the Novachips 4 and 8TB SSDs.  We had, and still have, that exclusive. They were the first notebook SSDs to operate with a single SSD controller. They were much too expensive to ever reach the hands of the consumer.  It was great and companies such as this were responsible for our success…just as Sabrent is today.  The difference, of course, is that Sabrent has enabled a price point that allows 8TB SSDs, powerful NVMe SSDs running at 3500MB/s data transfer in fact, to be purchased by anyone who needs it. and they are available on Amazon right now!

SABRENT ROCKET Q 8TB NVME SSD

The Sabrent Rocket Q SSD is a PCIe 3.0 x4 (4-lane) SSD that uses the latest NVMe 1.3 protocol. The Rocket Q is available in capacities of 500GB,1, 2, 4 and 8TB.  It is of a 2280 (80mm) form factor and is a M.2 SSD, meaning that it measures 80mm x 22mm and weighs about 7 grams.  Consider for a minute that a hard drive weighs more than 10 times that of a SSD, and an 8TB hard drive could never be reduced in size to fit into a laptop or ultrabook.  The Sabrent Rocket Q M.2 SSD can.

Performance for the Sabrent Rocket Q is listed at 3.4GB/s read and 2.9GB/s write and will reach 550K IOPS read and 680K IOPS write at low 4k random disk access.  This SSD has a lifespan rating of 1800TBW and it comes with a 5-year limited warranty, when registered.  If not registered, you only get 1-year warranty. Performance of other capacities of the Rocket Q is variable, as shown in this chart:

BUILD AND COMPONENTS

The Sabrent Rocket Q NVMe SSD is built on a blue PCB (printed circuit board) and the heart and soul of this device is the Phison PS5012-E12 8-channel NVMe SSD controller.

There are 8 packages of Micron’ latest  96-layer QLC (4-bit) flash NAND memory, four on each side of the PCB with each package having 1TB of RAW NAND storage capacity.  Once formatted, the total available storage for consumers use is reduced to 7154GB. There are also two Kingston 8GB labeled DRAM cache memory chips, one on each side of the SSD.

An industry first is that fact that as much as 25% of the NAND can be used as SLC cache to speed up and maintain the performance of the SSD.  For the Sabrent Rocket Q 8TB SSD, that is a whopping 2TB.  The SLC cache alone in th is SSD is larger than most SSDs.  Last word on componentry (Is that really a word?), don’t remove the branding from the SSD as we did or your warranty will be VOID… as we can see here.