Sabrent Rocket NVMe 2280 M.2 Review

Introduction

The Sabrent Rocket Q was all about the complex NAND on board, and the way in which the controller utilised some of the NAND as SLC cache for faster speeds. Today we’re looking at the regular Sabrent Rocket, a more conventional NVMe M.2 drive, to discover how it compares.

The model we have on test today utilises the same Phison E12S controller as the Rocket Q – a smaller version of the regular Phison E12 controller allowing for more room on the drive for the NAND chips – but unlike the Q version this utilises the 96 layer Western Digital BiCS4 NAND which scales linearly from the BiCS3 which which we’re more familiar.

Naturally when it comes to storage drives the only figure we’re really interested in as consumers is how fast it goes under different loadings, and at least on paper the Sabrent Rocket promises to be very quick indeed, with claimed speeds that easily saturate the PCI Express 3.0 bandwidth.

On paper is all well and good, but we much rather see how it performs in the real world and that’s what we’re here to find out, with particular attention to how it matches up to the Rocket Q we’ve recently reviewed. Is the regular Rocket going to live up to that name?

Technical Specifications