Sabrent has begun sales of its highly anticipated Rocket 5 solid state drives that promise to become some of the best SSDs available today. The drives have the PCIe 5.0 x4 interface and boast a sequential read speed of up to 14 GB/s, which is in line with other top-end SSDs. However, performance comes at a cost.
"You are ready for something new," a statement by Sabrent reads. "We are here to deliver. Our freshest, super-fast SSD, the Rocket 5, is finally here."
Sabrent's Rocket 5 is based on the Phison PS5026-E26 controller as well as Micron's 3D TLC NAND memory with a 2400 MT/s data transfer rate. The higher-end 2TB and 4TB drives are officially rated for an up to 14,000 MB/s sequential read speed as well as an up to 12,000 MB/s sequential write speed, along with a random read/write capability of 1.4 million IOPS. The 1 TB version has slightly reduced speeds — up to 13,000 MB/s and up to 9,500 MB/s — due to a lower degree of parallelism, yet it will still outperform many of the currently available drives that use a PCIe Gen5 x4 interface.
Speaking of contemporary high-end PCIe Gen5 SSDs that use the Phison PS5026-E26 controller, the vast majority of them typically achieve maximum sequential read speeds ranging from 10 GB/s to 12 GB/s, with the speed varying based on the type of 3D NAND paired with the potent controller. Initially, these drives were equipped with 1600 MT/s 3D NAND, but more recent versions have been upgraded to 2000 MT/s 3D NAND. Now that 2400 MT/s 3D NAND is available, Sabrent can release its Rocket 5 with up to 14,000 MB/s sequential write speed. To make this SSD possible, Sabrent has collaborated with Phison to maximize the performance of the controller and come close to fully saturating the nearly 16GB/s bandwidth of a PCIe 5.0 x4 interface.
Sabrent believes that the Sabrent Rocket 5 drives will operate smoothly with heatsinks provided by high-end motherboards. For systems that lack pre-installed heatsinks for some reason, Sabrent will also include a relatively large active cooling solution with the drive.
For obvious reasons, Sabrent's Rocket 5 is a quite expensive product. The 1TB version is priced at $190, the 2TB model carries a $340 price tag, and a 4TB costs $730.
