Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus claims fastest M.2 SSD crown

[HEXUS]

Leapfrogs the Samsung 980 Pro which was revealed this weekend by the Korean tech giant.

Read more.

[LSG501]

I want to see a real world comparison between the 'worlds fastest' and it's competitors when being used as things like a scratch disk when doing things like photo/video editting, 3D modelling/rendering etc rather than just 'benchmarks'... maybe an article hexus could consider doing....

Oh and that heatsink looks just perfect for fitting underneath your gpu where a lot of the nvme slots sit..../s

[blokeinkent]

Look forward to some proper benchmarks on this. Sabrent make great drives but are often overlooked for some reason compared to the "usual players" in the game.

[Corky34]

No mention of the IOPS, personally that's more important for me than the overall 'speed'.

And I'm not talking about the marketing hype of QD32 IOPS, it's the low QD that are important.

[rave_alan]

5 gb/s, that is a lot, Windows will boot in 3 seconds.

[KultiVator]

5 gb/s, that is a lot, Windows will boot in 3 seconds.

I've got the previous top-end Rocket 4 drive from Sabrent - which already boots Windows 10 in ~3 seconds (so long as Windows Update is not applying changes!) - so this should up the game further.

Will be interesting to see the price point given the super-fast TLC Flash cells being used.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Samsung have just gotten complacent. They made a good name for themselves,and are pushing out SSD products which for the most part cost more per GB than competing drives,with a few tweaks here and there every year. Then they like Intel are increasingly banking on brand loyalty instead.

[Iota]

Interesting that the speed claims are for the 2 TB drive, and they are only "up to" and don't include the QD used to test.

At least the Samsung 980 Pro drive briefly listed showed QD1 as well as the more normal 1 TB drive size people can normally afford. It'll be interesting to see the write endurance of these drives if they're moving to TLC.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Interesting that the speed claims are for the 2 TB drive, and they are only "up to" and don't include the QD used to test.

At least the Samsung 980 Pro drive briefly listed showed QD1 as well as the more normal 1 TB drive size people can normally afford. It'll be interesting to see the write endurance of these drives if they're moving to TLC.

600TBW minimum:
https://www.anandtech.com/show/16052...-listed-online

[QuorTek]

Would go Samsung, never had a problem with, also would like to see real world tests instead of benchmarks and relieability and such over heavy load that could last weeks and more.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

I never had a problem with other brands too,as have mates.My oldest SSD is a Kingston I won on here in 2012 and it still works!

Samsung is complacent like Intel are,and trading off past achievements. They like Intel seem to have lost interest in consumer SSDs,so just push out rubbish like QLC 860/870 QVO,trading off their name,when you can get TLC drives for similar money. Terrible performance,and relatively poor endurance.

Now instead of pushing PCI-E 4.0 to the mainstream,they cheapened out and replaced the MLC 970 PRO range,with worse TLC,and probably will charge beyond the odds for it.



The TBW of the 980 "PRO" is the same as their cheaper 970 EVO. The 980 "PRO" is basically a PCI-E 4.0 version of the 970 EVO. Its a bait and switch.

[DanceswithUnix]

The TBW of the 980 "PRO" is the same as their cheaper 970 EVO. The 980 "PRO" is basically a PCI-E 4.0 version of the 970 EVO. Its a bait and switch.

I'm guessing they expect the mainline parts to go QLC making the TLC part (that we used to consider the dodgy slow flash) the robust Pro version. How long has it been since the Pro parts were completely SLC flash?

1M IOPS is a nice figure, even if the real world will probably never see it.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

I'm guessing they expect the mainline parts to go QLC making the TLC part (that we used to consider the dodgy slow flash) the robust Pro version. How long has it been since the Pro parts were completely SLC flash?

1M IOPS is a nice figure, even if the real world will probably never see it.

An utter fail really,because even Crucial now just released the new P5 which uses TLC NAND,instead of QLC which the P1/P2 use. Intel has just apparently given up.

[Corky34]

Don't most of the drives that use MLC (sorry if i got the acronym wrong (the one with 3 bits per cell) have SLC (2bits per cell) caches on them? Granted that won't be as fast over the entire drive but shouldn't it make them cheaper and i guess 'normal' people don't have much need for the sort of sustained speed you get with an all SLC drive.

[supremelaw]

I would like to see a serious workstation built
with 4 x 2TB Sabrent Gen4 M.2 installed
in ASRock Hyper Quad M.2 card. If 4x4 bifurcation
is not available in the motherboard's UEFI/BIOS,
Highpoint recently announced similar 4x4 AICs
that do not require bifurcation support,
but they are necessarily more expensive.

That ASRock AIC comes with dip switches that
support multiples of such AICs installed in a
single motherboard.

We had a lot of success recently installing
a bootable Highpoint SSD7103 in a refurbished
HP Z220 workstation: the install went very
smoothly, and with CDM we measured READs
at 11,697 MB/second from 4 x Samsung 970 EVO Plus.

[DanceswithUnix]

Don't most of the drives that use MLC (sorry if i got the acronym wrong (the one with 3 bits per cell) have SLC (2bits per cell) caches on them? Granted that won't be as fast over the entire drive but shouldn't it make them cheaper and i guess 'normal' people don't have much need for the sort of sustained speed you get with an all SLC drive.

SLC is single level, what we originally just called "Flash".
MLC is multi level, but taken to mean 2 bits per cell.
TLC is the current standard of triple bit per cell.
QLC is the latest quad bit per cell.

SLC cache is a nice performance hack, but not yet universal.
To be honest, for the average user even a really slow QLC drive like Intel's current one is still fast enough and certainly still massively faster than the best spinning disc. SLC drives are an oddity really, they are so expensive that even for server/workstation use you may be better off setting up a RAID array of cheaper TLC drives giving better overall throughput and more storage.