Today we are taking a look at the Sabrent Rocket Q4 2TB SSD. This is Sabrent’s QLC-based PCIe 4.0 SSD featuring the new Phison PS5016-E16 controller, DRAM cache, and Micron QLC NAND. We will have the opportunity to benchmark it against the previous generation Rocket Q 2TB drive, as well as Sabrent’s recent flagship drive the Rocket 4 Plus 2TB.
Sabrent Rocket Q4 2TB
The Sabrent Rocket Q4 2TB comes in a double-sided M.2 2280 (80mm) form factor.
Much like previous Sabrent drives, the drive label is applied on top of a thin copper heat spreader. Beneath the label and heatspreader there is the Phison PS5016-E16 controller, a DRAM cache, and 2 Micron 96L 512GB NAND packages.
The back has a product information label, the other half of the DRAM cache, and the other 2 512GB NAND packages. That brings the total NAND on the drive to 2048GB, which leaves 48GB reserved by the controller. This configuration is very common on consumer 2TB SSDs.
Sabrent Rocket Q4 Specs
The Sabrent Rocket Q4 line of TLC-based SSDs has been announced in sizes ranging from 1TB to 4TB.
Our 2TB drive is the middle SKU, and the specs are very close to the top end unit. This drive is rated at 4850 MB/s sequential read, and 3600 MB/s sequential write speeds. 400 TBW represents a smaller than average rated endurance for a drive of this size, and in fact all of the endurance levels for the Rocket Q4 line are on the small side. By comparison, the PCIe 3.0 Sabrent Rocket Q 2TB had a 530 TBW endurance rating, and the recently reviewed Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus 2TB with its TLC NAND had a rated endurance of 1400 TBW. While 400 TBW of endurance is still more than sufficient to last well beyond the warranty period for normal consumer loads, the overall downward trend of drive endurance is not a positive one and something we hope to see reverse course in time.
CrystalDiskInfo can give us some basic information about the SSD, and confirms we are operating at PCIe 4.0 x4 speeds using NVMe 1.3.
Test System Configuration
We are using the following configuration for this test:
- Motherboard: ASUS PRIME X570-P
- CPU: AMD Ryzen 9 3900X (12C/24T)
- RAM: 2x 16GB DDR4-3200 UDIMMs
Our testing uses the Sabrent Rocket Q4 2TB as the boot drive for the system, installed in the M.2_1 slot on the motherboard. The drive is filled to 85% capacity with data and then some is deleted, leaving around 60% used space on the volume.
Next, we are going to get into our performance testing.
I’m very happy about any storage review, but I surprised to see so many reviews on non-pro storage (QLC and DRAM-less) here on STH. There are a lot of interesting “server” storage that could be interesting to have a closer look at. Seagate have a lot of pro and semi-pro drives for example.
Another thing I would really appreciate included is SQL performance benchmarks.