Sabrent Rocket NVMe 2280 M.2 Review

Up Close

Many M.2 drives come in the bare minimum of packaging, as you might expect given that it requires no drivers or particularly complicated installtion instructions and will quickly be binned. The Sabrent approach is to encase the Rocket M.2 in a tin to ensure it survives your local postal service unscathed. We appreciate the large finger holes that allow you to remove it without placing any undue stress upon the already thin PCB.

We have the 4TB model on test today, which has NAND chips on both sides of the drive. The compact nature of the E12S controller enables the 2TB and under models to be single sided, but at this capacity it's too much to ask so both sides it is.

Beneath both labels are thin copper heatspreaders doing their best to average out any heat generated across the entirety of the PCB. Those of you with motherboard M.2 heatspreaders will be glad to know there is no large heatsink to remove. Fit and forget.

The cache takes the form of the Nanya Technology NT5CC256M16ER-EK, which is a DDR3L SDRAM 4Gb chip running at 1.35V. Mmm dedicated cache.