Published: July 26, 2023 | Source: Sabrent | Author: Tom Logan

Sabrent Quad Drive NVMe RAID Card Review

Conclusion

Sometimes a product is simple enough to review, and the Sabrent Quad-Drive PCIe NVMe is one such item.

It’s just a shade under Â£100, albeit unpopulated by drives, and works flawlessly to bring you extra capacity to your system if you run anything but a single PCIe ITX motherboard. Given how much extra you have to spend on a motherboard to get this many M.2 slots when compared to regular chipsets that might have two or three, it almost becomes a free addon if you’re determined to have the most storage possible. By supported all possible RAID modes you are free to go all in on blazing speed, or have maximum data backup potential, depending upon your needs.

Our testing showed the kind of performance that it is possible to attain too. At smaller block sizes you’re largely still running at the speed of the drives we’re using, but as it clicks through the gears into larger sequential file sizes it’s clear that some truly outstanding speeds are possible. It wasn’t that long ago we were all left slack-jawed as 2.5″ SSDs maximised the transfer rates of the SATA bus, and now we’ve got a setup which we saw peaks of 13.7 GB/s read and 12.8 GB/s write. We don’t know about you, but we’re impressed. Similarly the design of the heatsink and thermal pads is good enough to keep our four Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus drives south of 60Â°C even passively cooled. Turn on the built-in fan and that drops to 55, arrange your case fans carefully and that drops still further to 50. It does all you desire and with the minimum of fuss.

Naturally there are a couple of caveats. Firstly we’ve got Â£480 worth of M.2 drives in it. However, that isn’t all it might seem as the total is Â£580, well below the price of a single 8TB Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus, but with all the additional speed you get with our setup. So it’s not cheap but, relatively, not expensive either. The biggest issue is one of placement. With all four slots populated you need a PCI Express x16 to get the performance we saw here, and the way that motherboards are designed that means that it’s right up against your graphics card. It’s also not tiny, so you’ll really be choking your GPU of airflow. Whether this is a price you’re willing to pay, only you can decide, but you need to be aware of it before you reach for your wallet.

However, if you have the right setup to fully utilise it, and the need for such a large, blisteringly quick storage solution, the Sabrent Quad-Drive NVMe PCIe Card is all you could wish for and wins our OC3D Performance Award.