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.

Today, we have for review the Sabrent Rocket Q, which comes in the M.2 form factor and a fast PCI-Express x4 3.0 NVMe connection to interface with the rest of the system.

Under the hood, the Rocket Q is built around a Phison E12S controller paired with Micron 96-layer 3D QLC flash. As expected, the SSD includes pseudo-SLC caching to improve performance. The Rocket Q also has a DRAM cache chip to avoid the random write performance issues of DRAM-less SSDs.

Sabrent is offering the Rocket Q in capacities of 1 TB ($130), 2 TB ($240), and 4 TB ($850). Endurance for these models is set at 260 TBW, 530 TBW, and 940 TBW respectively. Sabrent also includes a five-year warranty.

Packaging

The Drive

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


Like most M.2 NVMe SSDs, the Sabrent Rocket Q connects to the host system over a PCI-Express 3.0 x4 interface.


Sabrent's sticker doubles up as a heatspreader due to it having copper foil underneath.


On the PCB, you'll find the controller, four flash chips, and one DRAM chip. The other side of the PCB is empty and will only be populated on the 2 TB and 4 TB version.

Chip Component Analysis

The flash controller is made by Phison and is their latest model with support for QLC and PCI-Express 3.0 x4. It uses eight flash channels and is produced on a 28 nm process at TSMC Taiwan. The main difference to the E12 without the "S" is that the E12S is physically smaller, works with half the DRAM capacity of the E12, and uses a metal case, which helps with thermals.


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


A single Kingston DDR3L-1866 chip provides 256 MB of fast DRAM storage for the controller to store the mapping tables. Having just 256 MB of DRAM per TB NAND capacity is new—normally, we'd be expecting 1 GB or 512 MB. This looks like a cost optimization by Phison. It'll be interesting to see performance numbers.