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.