The Sabrent Rocket Q is an excellent, cost-effective drive for read-heavy workloads (nearly all consumer activities). The use of QLC flash lets them achieve price points that beat any TLC SSD on the market. Even at its low price you get a DRAM cache chip, which ensures random write performance is good. Paired with the extremely large SLC cache, this results in impressive random write performance, which is also reflected in our real-life tests (WinRAR).

Averaged over all our real-life benchmarks, we see the Sabrent Rocket Q slightly behind most M.2 NVMe SSDs, but the differences are small—just a few percent. Compared to other QLC drives, the Rocket Q roughly matches the Intel 660p and is 4% slower than the Crucial P1. I mentioned the large 250 GB SLC cache before, and it comes in really handy to mask QLC's weakness—write speeds. When writing directly to QLC flash, the speeds (for any QLC SSD) are in HDD territory, around 150 MB/s. If the SLC cache is large though, you'll rarely encounter this situation since the SSD will direct incoming writes to its cache first, and it's highly unlikely for consumers to write that much data in one go. Interestingly, these 250 GB in SLC mode match the 1 TB capacity in QLC mode. This means that the Rocket Q will operate its full capacity in SLC mode and move data to QLC when the drive is not busy. I verified this by filling the drive with 250 GB of data, waiting a few minutes, and then sending a large write burst to the drive, which indeed ran at full speed, not 150 MB/s. Even with the drive 90% full, write rates were good, so it's not like you write 250 GB/s once at full speed and then have terrible write rates until you free up those 250 GB, which will probably never happen on a 1 TB SSD.

Like nearly all M.2 SSDs without a heatsink, the Sabrent Rocket Q is not immune against thermal throttling when heavily loaded with writes, but the throttling algorithm is very well behaved. Initially, the drive will write at 1.7 GB/s and drop to 1.2 GB/s when it senses overheating. Actually, that's a very good result. You can write at 1.4 GB/s constantly without thermal throttling, which puts the Rocket Q in the top three for this test.

Currently, the Sabrent Rocket Q is listed for $130 on Amazon, last week I've seen it for $120, and a while ago, it was even cheaper. It seems the reason are shortages in NAND flash availability, as SSD pricing is generally up a bit compared to Christmas time. At $130, the Rocket Q is very competitively priced, matching the Intel 660p, but $10 more expensive than the Crucial P1. Compared to the Crucial P1, the P1 has better average performance, but the Rocket Q has the better SLC cache, so it will shine with larger workloads. At the end of the day I'd say the differences are slim, and it's mostly pricing that will decide. It's good to see that Sabrent includes a five-year warranty with the Rocket Q—many other vendors don't do that.