The Sabrent Rocket is the bigger brother of the Rocket Q we reviewed a few weeks ago. While the Rocket Q is highly optimized for cost and value, using QLC flash, the Rocket in today's review is targeted at more demanding users who want higher performance. Internally, the Sabrent Rocket uses the highly popular Phison E12S controller we've seen on many other SSDs before, paired with 96-layer TLC flash from Micron. Unlike some value-oriented drives, a DRAM cache chip is available, but it is only 512 MB—usually, 1 GB is installed on 1 TB SSDs.

DRAM on an SSD is used as fast temporary storage for the drive's internal mapping tables, which translate between physical disk addresses as seen by the OS and the actual location of where the data is stored in the flash chips: "which chip, at which location". Using DRAM has a speed advantage as it operates much faster than flash, but it's a cost/performance trade off. DRAM makes a big performance difference for random writes, especially when those are spread out over a larger area.

Averaged over all our real-life tests, the Sabrent Rocket does well. It is one of the fastest drives in our test group, only a few percent behind the top-dog models, like the Samsung 970 Pro, HP EX950, and Kingston KC2000. Sabrent's SSD can impress in tests that write a lot of data because of the high random write and sequential write performance numbers, even at low queue depths, which are typical for today's consumer workloads. Our synthetic tests show that read performance is a little bit below the fastest drives, but real-life test results are barely affected. Seems read performance is high enough not to make a big difference when it comes to real applications.

Our weakest test result is no doubt "Write Intensive Usage". With just 16 GB, the SLC cache on the Sabrent Rocket is very small by today's standards, especially considering this is a 1 TB drive. We regularly encounter SSDs of this capacity class with 150 GB SLC cache, which is ten times as much as the Rocket offers. This makes a big difference when it comes to large, sustained, writes, like restoring from a backup, disk image, or when copying over games from another drive. However, the Rocket can redeem itself a bit because it offers very good transfer rates while the drive is writing directly to TLC. Many TLC SSDs drop to 500 MB/s or even below with their cache exhausted, but the Sabrent Rocket does much better here, reaching around 1 GB/s.

Sabrent isn't including a heatsink on the Rocket, just a copper foil that acts as a heatspreader. While that can't avoid thermal throttling completely, it does help somewhat. Instead of throttling after a minute at maximum write speed, you now get four minutes, or 300 GB of data processed, which should be sufficient for nearly all consumer tasks. If you write at lower speeds, the Rocket can sustain 1.4 GB/s incoming writes indefinitely without thermal throttling, which is a very good result that's close to the best we've ever seen.

Overall, the Sabrent Rocket is a very decent SSD with good performance that nicely complements the Rocket Q in Sabrent's lineup. The drive currently retails for $150 for the 1 TB version, which is a little bit on the high side, but not completely crazy, like what Samsung is asking for their SSDs. There are several interesting alternatives in this price range, though, like the HP EX950 for $135, ADATA SX8200 Pro for $140, and Silicon Power P34A80 for $130. If you are looking for a slightly better bang for the buck, Sabrent's own Rocket Q at $120 for 1 TB is worth checking out. Other budget options are the Crucial P1 for $105 and Kingston A2000 for $125. These prices are in constant flux, though, both up and down, so watch the market for a week or so before making a buying decision. If you need more capacity, Sabrent has you covered as they also offer the Rocket in 2 TB and 4 TB variants.