Meet the Sabrent Rocket Q4, the world’s first QLC-powered PCIe 4.0 SSD

If there is an SSD manufacturer to watch out for, it’s Sabrent, an up and coming SSD maker who has done a lot to innovate within this marketplace. To start, they were one of the first SSD markers to adopt QLC NAND within their high-performance RocketQ series of M.2 NVMe SSDs, and later they became the first to release an 8TB QLC-powered NVMe SSD onto the consumer market. 

We reviewed Sabrent’s 8TB Rocket Q NVMe SSD earlier this month, and to say the least; we were very impressed. Now, Sabrent has revealed a PCIe 4.0 QLC-based SSD, bringing Sabrent’s performance levels to new heights while continuing to use QLC NAND. 

So far, we know that Sabrent’s Rocket Q4 NVMe SSDs will ship in 2TB and 4TB flavours, offering users sequential read/write speeds of 4800MBps/3600MBps and 4900MBps/3500MBps respectively. 

In the US, the 2TB and 4TB versions of this drive cost $320 and $770 respectively. Right now, both of these drives appear to be available with and without a premium heatsinks. Purchasing the heatsink-less version will save users around $20. 

With the Rocket Q4 series, Sabrent is boldly going where no SSD manufacturer has gone before, merging the raw data rates of PCIe 4.0 and the capacity of QLC NAND to create something which no other SSD maker has. The question now is whether or not this drive’s use of QLC NAND will be a major negative for the drive, or if this drive will repeat the success of its PCIe 3.0 based counterpart.