Sabrent Developing Ultra Fast PCIe 5 SSD That Could Hit 14 GBps

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A drive that can fully saturate the capabilities of Phison's E26 controller

Prototype 1TB Sabrent Rocket X5
(Image credit: Sabrent)

According to a recent Sabrent newsletter, the company is developing a new "Rocket X5" PCIe Gen 5 SSD that has the potential to reach speeds of 14 GBps. This drive is currently in the prototyping stage, and Sabrent is determined to hit the 14 GBps transfer speed target for the finalized product if possible. If the X5 can attain that lofty mark, it will outperform all of the best SSDs on the market today.

The Rocket X5 is in the development phase right now, with Sabrent saying the name and label could change before release and the transfer rate. Effectively, Sabrent is trying to push performance as high as current SSD technology allows without other factors getting in the way.

Currently, prototype versions of the Rocket X5 are already hitting read speeds in excess of 12 GBps, exceeding the speeds offered by the first PCIe Gen 5 SSDs to hit the market. So it appears Sabrent is making good progress on achieving its 14 GBps goal, at least for now.

Sabrent Rocket X5 Benchmark

(Image credit: Sabrent)

All PCIe Gen 5 SSD manufacturers right now are shipping products with either 10 GBps or 12 GBps transfer speeds. For those of you unaware, 14 GBps to 15 GBps is the spec limit for PCIe Gen 5 x4, and is what makes this transfer rate so incentivizing for manufacturers to hit.

The issue is related to production issues surrounding higher speed 2400MTps 3D NAND flash, which is required to hit these higher transfer speeds. Currently, none of the three 3D NAND manufacturers that make 2400MTps chips, including Micron, SK Hynix and YMTC, have been able to deliver large volumes of these chips to the market.

Technically, Micron does not have this issue. It is well ahead of SK Hynix and YMTC in both maturity and mass production, but the company has been dealing with chip yield shortages bottlenecking production. These issues should have been resolved already at the time of this writing, according to Tom's Hardware sources, but this has not been confirmed. For more details, check out our previous coverage here.

As a result, it appears there is no guarantee the Rocket X5 will hit 14 GBps whenever it launches. The drive's final characteristics will depend on Sabrent's production strategy and whether or not it wants to wait for high-speed 2400MTps NAND flash or skip it entirely and launch the drive with slower specifications.

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Aaron Klotz
Aaron Klotz
Contributing Writer

Aaron Klotz is a contributing writer for Tom’s Hardware, covering news related to computer hardware such as CPUs, and graphics cards.

19 Comments Comment from the forums
  • InvalidError
    If you cannot push higher clocks, you can still push extra NAND channels at lower individual channel speeds for the same or greater aggregate bandwidth at increased IO concurrency. Of course, then you need a controller with those extra channels.
    Reply
  • PlaneInTheSky
    We want fast random, who cares about sequential.

    I'm not running a Petabyte cloud datacenter am I.

    So far no PCIe 5.0 has shown any improvement in random reads over PCIe 4.0

    Intel Optane is still the fastest SSD on the planet, nothing else even comes close.
    Reply
  • vern72
    I almost dread to see the size of that heat sink. It's probably the height of a PCI card.
    Reply
  • Alvar "Miles" Udell
    So we went from a Mustang in SATA to Porche to a Lamborghini to a Ferrari to a Veyron now to those 1800bhp area electric hypercars, with prices to match.

    And this is great for the 1%, but for the other 99% of us, those who don't run hyperscale datacenters, we're waiting for the Ferrari with a Mustang price tag, we want these 4¢/GB drives with Samsung 980 Pro or SK Hynix P41 level performance. No doubt even the 1% want it as well...
    Reply
  • ezst036
    Alvar Miles Udell said:
    So we went from a Mustang in SATA to Porche to a Lamborghini to a Ferrari to a Veyron now to those 1800bhp area electric hypercars, with prices to match.

    And this is great for the 1%, but for the other 99% of us, those who don't run hyperscale datacenters, we're waiting for the Ferrari with a Mustang price tag, we want these 4¢/GB drives with Samsung 980 Pro or SK Hynix P41 level performance. No doubt even the 1% want it as well...

    I'm still using SATA for my daily driver. I have an NVME in another computer, can't even tell the difference. Not unless I have a specific workload and actively looking for it.
    Reply
  • TechieTwo
    The moto of the SSD industry appears to be: "Over-promise and Under-deliver".

    A fast gen 4 M.2 SSD does make a noticeable difference in PC performance. These gen 5 SSDs -whenever they actually show, will not provide a major performance diff over gen 4 unless you have large files or many files being accessed concurrently such as in a large database or similar.
    Reply
  • DSzymborski
    Incoming thread of someone running an OS in RAID 0 with these, screwing it up, and blaming us somehow when they lose their data and for suggesting the whole thing was a bad idea.
    Reply
  • HideOut
    PlaneInTheSky said:
    We want fast random, who cares about sequential.

    I'm not running a Petabyte cloud datacenter am I.

    So far no PCIe 5.0 has shown any improvement in random reads over PCIe 4.0

    Intel Optane is still the fastest SSD on the planet, nothing else even comes close.

    And sadly out of production :(
    Reply
  • HideOut
    Sabrent Developing Ultra Fast PCIe 5 SSD That Could Hit 14 GBps

    These kind of filler "stories" crack me up. Reminds me of CNN's "BREAKING NEWS" for a dog pissing on a sidewalk. Like holy boy/girl who cried wolf. EVERY SSD OEM is doing this exact thing. Its not news, its the newest standard.
    Reply
  • usertests
    PlaneInTheSky said:
    We want fast random, who cares about sequential.

    I'm not running a Petabyte cloud datacenter am I.

    So far no PCIe 5.0 has shown any improvement in random reads over PCIe 4.0

    Intel Optane is still the fastest SSD on the planet, nothing else even comes close.

    3D XPoint was a post-NAND technology that got to market ahead of its vaporware competitors. It wasn't fast, cheap, or dense enough to seriously replace DRAM or NAND, so it occupied a new niche tier in the middle that benefited some companies, but wasn't worth investing in. Intel cutting and running says less than Micron doing so first.

    Maybe another company will take a stab at introducing some phase change/crossbar/memristor non-volatile memory aiming at NAND and/or DRAM. If you can kill both at the same time, you have universal memory and a new era of computing. I would be satisfied with something better than NAND in every way, even if it doesn't have the speed or endurance to replace DRAM. It would also be nice to see some 3D DRAM with higher capacity and lower cost-per-bit for consumers.
    Reply