Sabrent Rocket 5 2TB SSD review: Rocketing to new heights

The Sabrent Rocket 5 represents one of the fastest SSDs we've ever tested. That's fitting, as Sabrent made a name for itself in the storage space with the original Rocket SSD. The company also pushed out the first two 8TB M.2 drives with the Rocket Q and Rocket 4 Plus, and the first DirectStorage-optimized drive with the Rocket 4 Plus-G. Now, it climbs to the top of the heap with a lightning fast PCIe 5.0 SSD that has been promised for quite some time. The wait has been worth it as the Rocket 5 is very fast indeed, and has some interesting results to separate it from other drives like the Crucial T705, competing with the best SSDs.

Sabrent waited to reveal its first PCIe 5.0 SSD until it knew it had could get the most out of the hardware. This bypassed the need for iterative updates, as happened with the original Rocket 4 Plus, and lets the drive leapfrog earlier models like the Crucial T700, Gigabyte Aorus Gen5 10000, and Corsair MP700. Sabrent also decided not to include a heatsink, which shouldn’t be a problem as most high-end motherboards include M.2 cooling. Aftermarket heatsinks also exist, and Sabrent makes those as well.

While we still have concerns about power consumption and heat production with these high-end PCIe 5.0 SSDs, with adequate cooling you won't have any issues with throttling. That's a good thing, as these drives can push some serious numbers. The Rocket 5 doesn’t set new records versus the T705, but it does throw some surprising numbers in our sustained writes testing, which makes things interesting.

Sabrent Rocket 5 Specifications

The Sabrent Rocket 5, like the Crucial T705, is available at 1TB for $189.99, 2TB for $339.99, and 4TB for $729.99. These two drives are priced similarly at 1TB and 2TB, with or without the T705’s heatsink, but the T705 is currently less expensive at 4TB. SSD prices are steadily creeping upward right now, so things may change.

Sabrent has previously been a leader in providing 8TB drives first, so there's a strong possibility we could see that for the Rocket 5 as well. The first 8TB PCIe 5.0 drive would be quite the achievement, though we don't even want to think about pricing for such a drive right now.

The Rocket 5 is rated for up to 14,000 / 12,000 MB/s for sequential reads and writes, and up to 1,400K / 1,400K random read and write IOPS. These numbers are more conservative than the T705, even though the drives use the same hardware, so we would expect similar performance levels. The Rocket also has a five-year warranty with 600TB of writes per TB capacity. Even for a fast PCIe 5.0 SSD, that should be plenty.

Sabrent Rocket 5 Software and Accessories

Sabrent has typical software support with its own SSD toolbox, known as the Rocket Control Panel, and an OEM edition of Acronis True Image. The former is useful for checking the drive's general drive health and for receiving firmware updates, if necessary. The latter is useful for imaging and cloning if you have an existing system. Free tools such as CrystalDiskInfo and Clonezilla can be used as alternatives with other drives, including the Rocket 5.

Sabrent Rocket 5 A Closer Look

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The Rocket 5 comes adorned with a simple copper, heat-spreading label on top, with a more informative label on the back. This is a double-sided drive, and it does require additional cooling. The label can remain in place when you apply your own cooling, either a motherboard M.2 heatsink or an aftermarket M.2 SSD cooler. The drive should not be run bare and is thus suboptimal for laptops. It can work in a PS5, but there are less expensive PCIe 4.0 options that will perform similarly in that role.

Beneath the copper label is the familiar Phison E26 SSD controller, a single DRAM package, and two NAND flash packages. The DRAM is a 4GB package of LPDDR4 from SK Hynix. This is double the expected amount of DRAM for most 2TB SSDs, but it's the standard amount for Phison E26 drives. The NAND packages are in a quad die package (QDP) configuration with four 1Tb dies of Micron’s 232-Layer TLC in each, or 512GB of NAND flash per package.

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The rear of the drive reveals the second pair of NAND flash packages. This positioning is interesting from a cooling perspective. A simple backplate or thermal pad is probably all that is needed here, as the controller is likely the largest contributor to the drive’s heat output. Cooling only the controller is an option, but you should not be dissuaded from cooling the entire drive or at least everything on top. NAND flash can handle heat and in some cases that can even be preferable to "too cold" temperatures, but for consumer usage it’s a simple matter of preventing the drive from throttling.

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