Introduction

Sabrent is an American hardware manufacturer that was founded in 1998. Their product range includes SSDs, external drive enclosures, cables, chargers, card readers, USB hubs, and similar peripherals. Over the last few years, they've made a name for themselves in the SSD market by offering highly cost effective solid-state drives with good performance.



Today, we're reviewing the Sabrent Rocket Nano v2 in the 2 TB variant. The Nano v2 is a highly compact portable SSD that utilizes the blazing fast USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 20 Gbps interface, which doubles the bandwidth over USB 3.2 Gen 2x1, aka USB 3.1 Gen 2. Many portable SSDs using USB 3.2 Gen 2x1 were bottlenecked by the USB interface speed, so it makes sense to increase the interface transfer rate by another notch. We previously reviewed several other 20 Gbps portable drives, and many of them were using a combination of a classic SSD controller plus a bridge chip that translates the USB protocol into whatever interface the controller speaks. Obviously, requiring two components increases complexity, size, and cost, and nowadays, supply chain logistics can be an issue too. The Sabrent Rocket Nano v2 portable SSD uses the Phison PS2251-18 controller, combining the company's SSD controller IP with an integrated USB interface, making it much simpler to build high-performance portable storage devices.

A while ago, finding a motherboard with USB 3.2 2x2 20 Gbps support has been difficult, but many recent motherboards for Intel LGA1700 and AMD Socket AM5 include the 20 Gbps USB support.

This review covers the 2 TB version of the Sabrent Rocket Nano v2, there's also a 1 TB and 4 TB version available.

Package

The Drive

The Sabrent Rocket Nano is very compact for a portable SSD, especially when you consider the performance offered.


The case looks great, it is made of thick metal, which gives it an ultra-high quality, rugged look and feel. A single USB-C port lets you connect to the drive. An activity indicator is included, too, look at the first picture, the little hole on the bottom right.


Phison includes this rubber case with the drive. Not sure why you'd want to use that—there's no moving parts inside the SSD so it doesn't need protection against shock. The rubber is also a dust magnet, I definitely prefer the metal look.