Introduction

Sabrent is an American hardware manufacturer that was founded in 1998. Their product ranges include external drive enclosures, cables, chargers, card readers, USB hubs, and similar peripherals. In 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.

They are particularly well-known for offering QLC drives with good performance at very reasonable pricing, like the Sabrent Rocket Q.



Today, we have for review the Sabrent Rocket Q4, which, as the name suggests, uses the PCI-Express 4.0 interface, which doubles the theoretical bandwidth over PCI-Express Gen 3. Under the hood, the Sabrent Rocket Q4 uses a Phison E16 controller, which we've seen on drives like the Gigabyte PCIe 4.0 SSD, Seagate FireCuda 520, and Corsair MP600 Core. The former drives were all based on TLC NAND flash, but the Rocket Q4 uses QLC flash instead. The flash chips are Micron 96-layer QLC, pretty much the market-dominating QLC available at this time. Two DDR4-2666 DRAM chips provide 2 GB of memory for the mapping tables of the SSD.

The Sabrent Rocket Q4 comes in capacities of 1 TB ($150), 2 TB ($300), and 4 TB ($700). Endurance for these models is set to 200 TBW, 400 TBW, and 800 TBW respectively. Sabrent includes a five-year warranty with the Rocket Q4. The big heatsink adds $20 to the price point.

Packaging

The Drive

The drive uses the M.2 2280 form factor, which makes it 22 mm wide and 80 mm long.


While most other M.2 NVMe SSDs transfer data over the PCI-Express 3.0 x4 interface, the Sabrent Rocket Q4 connects to the host system over a PCI-Express 4.0 x4 interface, which doubles the theoretical bandwidth.


Even the drive without the additional $20 heatsink purchase comes with something that help with cooling. This copper foil acts as a heatspreader, which moves the heat away from the controller and into the rest of the SSD. This can be useful to soak up heat from short burst of write activity.


If you want better cooling, Sabrent offers this massive M.2 heatsink. It is compatible with all M.2 SSDs, not only models from Sabrent, so you'll be able to keep using it on future SSDs down the road.

The construction is very solid; screws are used to hold the drive together very firmly.


These little copper pipes do look like heatpipes. I was curious and cut them open—they're solid copper. While not heatpipes, they still contribute to cooling.


On the PCB, you'll find the controller, four flash chips, and two DRAM chips.

Chip Component Analysis

The PS5016-E16 from Phison was one of the first controllers with support for PCI-Express 4.0. It is considered "first generation PCIe 4.0" because newer, more modern controllers offer significantly improved performance.


The four QLC flash chips are made by Micron, built using 96 layers.


Two Hynix DDR4-2666 chips provide 2 GB of fast DRAM storage for the controller to store the mapping tables.

Test Setup