The Sabrent Rocket Nano v2 is the company's most compact portable solid-state-drive. It uses the Phison PS2251-18 (U18) controller, which combines the USB interface and SSD controller into a single IC. This helps reduce cost and complexity, as just one instead of two chips is required. Obviously, this also means that drives can be more compact, because components are more tightly integrated. Unlike many other vendors, which build external SSDs by including a full-sized M.2 NVMe inside the case, Sabrent was smart, choosing to go with a proper, highly compact design. As a result, you get a tiny portable high-performance SSD—most other competitors are considerably bigger.

Performance numbers of the Rocket Nano are good. Thanks to its fast USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 20 Gbps interface, the 1 GB/s bottleneck of most external SSDs is no longer a problem. In terms of sequential speeds, the drive reaches 1.2 to 1.6 GB/s writes. Reads do run a bit slower at 700 to 1000 MB/s. This makes the drive a good deal slower than portable SSDs using SMI USB 3.2 2x2 controllers, but it's not a huge difference. Random IO is not that important for a portable SSD unless you want to run portable programs or games from it; for example, when using the SSD to expand storage on game consoles. In that use case, write performance is really good, but reads are surprisingly weak. What's surprising is that QD2 reads are slower than QD1—it should be the opposite. As expected, there is no DRAM cache for the mapping tables of the SSD. However, that isn't a dealbreaker, as it is an ultra-rare workload for a portable SSD.

Physical construction of the Sabrent Rocket Nano v2 is outstanding and it looks great at the same time. Thanks to the thick metal shell, there's no way you'll be able to break the drive by crushing or bending it. While some metal surfaces are very susceptible to fingerprint residue—this is no issue with the Nano. I do wish Sabrent had offered some sort of IP dust/water protection rating, which shouldn't be that difficult to achieve, given the construction of the drive. Unlike some competing drives, you do get an activity indicator LED, which can be useful to find out whether a transfer operation has completed. Temperatures were no problem on the Nano v2—it gets slightly warm to touch.

Sustained write speeds of the Rocket Nano v2 are very impressive, reaching almost 700 MB/s, which is an excellent result for a portable SSD. The SLC cache is extremely small though with just 24 GB, no idea why. If you plan on copying hundreds of gigabytes per session without pause, then look elsewhere. If your working sets are smaller, or you have pauses in transfers that give the drive room to breathe, the Sabrent Rocket Nano can shine though.

The Sabrent Rocket Nano v2 2 TB is widely available for a price of $160. I like that they offer a 4 TB version, too, for $350. While $160 for 2 TB is not unreasonable, it's not cheap either. The cheapest 2 TB portable SSDs sell for around $90, but these have the slower 10 Gbps USB interface. Strong competition comes from the Corsair EX100U 2 TB, which sells for $115 and is built using the same controller and NAND flash. Kingston's XS2000 for $160 offers considerably better performance, but falls behind when it comes to sustained writes.