Sabrent Quad Drive NVMe RAID Card Review
Up Close
Sometimes in this job we look at what we have arranged on our desk and wonder how we ended up here. 8TB of NVMe storage about to be stuck into a giant 8TB RAID0 array. It’s good to be the King.
The card itself is simple in its design, with everything aimed towards a all-in-one heatspreader/heatsink design, with only the Sabrent logo giving away the manufacturer. The rear has plenty of holes too, which work in conjunction with the onboard fan and your system fans to help keep this number of drives cool. To reiterate, cool M.2 drives are faster than hot ones, and when you’ve got four running at this kind of speeds, temperature control is key.
By needing PCI Express x16 to make full use of all four bays, it’s good that the Sabrent Quad-Drive is slender, but even still the design of most motherboards mean that you’ll have to make a decision about your GPU cooling, unless you get a riser and mount the Sabrent vertically, and thus compromise it’s cooling. It is a delicate juggling act.
Inside it’s about all you would expect from an M.2 expander. The holes you don’t use to mount the drives help with airflow, and there are enough that you can mount all sizes of M.2. Thick thermal pads help dissipate heat, and the tiny fan will give a little airflow. At this end of the market, certainly once you’ve populated it, we expect that you’ve already got good in-case airflow.
Mmmm pretty.
