Sabrent Announces the Rocket 4 DRAMless M.2 Gen 4 SSD

[btarunr]

Sabrent today debuted the Rocket 4 line of DRAMless M.2 NVMe Gen 4 SSDs. Built in the M.2-2280 form-factor, these drives take advantage of the PCI-Express 4.0 x4 host interface, and provide sequential transfer speeds of up to 7.4 GB/s reads, with up to 6.4 GB/s writes. The drives also offer 4K random access performance of up to 1 million IOPS reads, and 0.95 million IOPS writes. For now, Sabrent is launching 1 TB and 2 TB capacity variants of the Rocket 4, but the company is preparing to launch a larger 4 TB variant soon.

The Sabrent Rocket 4 combines a Phison E27T series DRAMless controller with Kioxia 162-layer 3D TLC NAND flash memory (also known as the BiCS 6). There's just a copper foil heat spreader to keep things cool. The 12 nm E27T doesn't run anywhere near as hot as the E18, so you can make do with the heatsink your motherboard includes, or run it the way it is. The 1 TB variant is priced at $99.99, and the 2 TB variant at $199.99. The company didn't reveal pricing of the unreleased 4 TB variant.



View at TechPowerUp Main Site

 

[Broken Processor]

Expensive for a gen 4 these days.

 

[natr0n]

dramless actually uses part of storage/flash for cache/buffer/whatever

 

[AleXXX666]

dramless actually uses part of storage/flash for cache/buffer/whatever

thx, I'm better with "onboard" cache rather than all these "swapping technologies", if you are old enough you can remember Vista fiasco for "USB TURBO CACHE" or whatever it was named the point is you use USB drive as a extra RAM cache lmfao... and that in pre-usb-c era...

 

[natr0n]

thx, I'm better with "onboard" cache rather than all these "swapping technologies", if you are old enough you can remember Vista fiasco for "USB TURBO CACHE" or whatever it was named the point is you use USB drive as a extra RAM cache lmfao... and that in pre-usb-c era...

Yeah readyboost was called

It still exists it seems too on win 10

 

[WonkoTheSaneUK]

thx, I'm better with "onboard" cache rather than all these "swapping technologies", if you are old enough you can remember Vista fiasco for "USB TURBO CACHE" or whatever it was named the point is you use USB drive as a extra RAM cache lmfao... and that in pre-usb-c era...

It was the sole reason for those 32GB & 64GB Intel Optane NVMe drives existing

 

[wNotyarD]

thx, I'm better with "onboard" cache rather than all these "swapping technologies", if you are old enough you can remember Vista fiasco for "USB TURBO CACHE" or whatever it was named the point is you use USB drive as a extra RAM cache lmfao... and that in pre-usb-c era...

Yeah readyboost was called

It still exists it seems too on win 10

Ain't gonna lie, Readyboost was a lifesaver for me when I used an Atom netbook.

About this drive... yeah, price seems steep for a DRAM-less PCIe 4.0 at this point.

 

[bonehead123]

No dram = auto no buy IMHO, especially at those prices

This forum is as close as any dram-less drives will ever get to any of my rigs, cause I won't ever touch them, even with YOUR 10 ft pole..

 

[Bwaze]

Any idea why the SSD capacity just stagnates for years now?

We had an 8 TB consumer SSD since mid 2020, four years ago. It is a crappy drive, Samsung SSD 870 QVO 8TB, which is natively 50% slower than a hard disk once you fill the cache...

And not only no consumer drive has surpassed that capacity, there are almost no other drives that matched it. I know after the transition to NVMe everybody says there's just no place for the chips (although we're getting ridiculously small 4TB drives), but companies have shown and promised consumer 8 TB NVMe drives - somewhere in the future. And mostly just forgot about them. There have been some releases that were priced at ridiculously high prices and have stayed there, and are so rare even reviews are scarce - and no wonder, who would buy a disk for 900+ EUR?

In the meanwhile even 4 years old Samsung SSD 870 QVO 8TB has begun to go up in price - from just above 300 EUR to over 500. A 4 years old drive on a technology nobody uses any more.

And nobody even comments that development. Years ago that would have been unheard of, stagnation for 4 years?

 

[wNotyarD]

Any idea why the SSD capacity just stagnates for years now?

Not only capacity is stagnated, TB/$ isn't getting much better as well. While up to 2TB got cheaper since inception, it plateau'ed. Higher capacities? Bad luck.

 

[AleXXX666]

It was the sole reason for those 32GB & 64GB Intel Optane NVMe drives existing

never used one... and removed some 32 gb msata drive from dell laptop back days lol

 

[FierceRed]

Any idea why the SSD capacity just stagnates for years now?

and no wonder, who would buy a disk for 900+ EUR?

Sort of answering the question right there.

Also, ours is not a species that does smart things to the envelope limit because they're smart things.

We do things as quickly and cheaply as possible - as long as lives we care about aren't in danger - for maximum personal gain, until "good enough" is reached.
Then we go back to the hot tub until we're bored again.

 

[LabRat 891]

TLC + DRAMless is, interesting...

Still, spendy for a DRAMless drive.
Their 2TB is where a high-value 4TB drive belongs.
Ex. I just picked up 2x 2TB P41 Plus (i670p descendant) QLC DRAMless gen4 drives for ~$110ea.

 

[A&P211]

Used 2tb nvme drivers on ebay go for $80-90. Still plenty of life in them.