Sabrent Rocket Q, Another Choice For 1TB NVMe On The Cheap
One Quarter Pseudo-SLC and 256MB of DDR3
Sabrent improved on the low cost QLC NVMe drive by setting one quarter of the Kioxia/Toshiba 96-layer 3D QLC to function as an SLC cache and including onboard memory to help the Phison PS5012-E12S-32 controller out. TechPowerUp reviewed the 1TB model, there are also 2 TB and 4 TB options which will cost $240 and $850 to pick up. As you should expect from a QLC drive, the performance drops after the cache is filled but the drive still keeps up with the Intel 660p and is a mere four percent slower than the Crucial P1. The tests did show a bit of thermal throttling which you can get more details about in the review.
You can grab it here, not a bad deal especially with a five year warranty.
Priced at $130 for the 1 TB version, the Sabrent Rocket Q SSD is one of the most affordable SSDs on the market. It uses a new Phison E12S controller, which has better thermal performance and can operate with smaller DRAM cache. Write speeds are impressive, thanks to 250 GB of pseudo-SLC cache.
I recently hit the point where I got tired of waiting to get a 1TB NVME SSD. I had been looking at the Intel 660p at around $110. That’s not a bad price and it’s got sufficiently better performance than the 1TB SATA drives (plus what idiot wastes a 4x PCI-E NVME slot on a SATA drive?)
I decided to look around at the other 1TB candidates. I quickly saw that you could get a lot more performance for not much of a price premium. $15 more got you an HP 920 and $25 more (than base) got you the 950. That’s a substantially higher performing drive. Same 5 year warranty, but with a higher total data written value.
For a drive I’m going to keep until it dies, it seems reasonable to pay a ~23% premium to get a much better drive.
I grabbed a Crucial P1 1TB NVME for about $95 on sale for storing/running VMs a couple months back. It’s now selling for ~$115 USD on Newegg (and a little more on Amazon). Not a big jump, but an increase nonetheless, so I’m glad I got it when I did.