Sabrent Rocket Q 8TB, M.2 2280 / M-Key / PCIe 3.1 x4

The sheer capacity alone is enough to make the 8TB Sabrent Rocket Q and 8TB Samsung 870 QVO impressive and groundbreaking products. But reaching this new capacity point for consumer SSDs has required significant tradeoffs. These two drives rely on QLC NAND flash memory with worse performance and write endurance than the TLC NAND used by mainstream consumer SSDs. Thankfully, the sheer high capacity of these drives offsets some of the downsides of QLC NAND, but it but does not eliminate all of them.

If you're European you'll be aware of a brand called Ronseal who famously advertised their products with the tagline "does exactly what it says on the tin". We could easily paraphrase this to sum up the Sabrent Rocket Q 8TB drive. If you want an NVMe drive, with an 8TB capacity, then get the Sabrent Rocket Q NVMe 8TB, it does exactly what it says on the ... label.

Without putting the cart before the horse, this SSD review is more or less about one thing. Capacity. 8TB. It is an enormous amount of storage space and, quite frankly, more than most consumers might ever fill. This is gold to the media professional however. Guys like me, in fact, have this bad habit of having terabytes of RAW photo and video files that, for some reason, we won’t ever delete. There is a reason, of course, and that is that I just know that I will need a certain file the second I delete the original RAW. Always happens that way. An 8TB SSD is perfection. Now add to that the fact that this SSD is not SATA, like so many might expect. It is a 8TB NVMe PCIe 3.0 SSD that can potential reach read data transfer speeds of 3.4GB/s and write speeds of 2.9GB/s. Once again, a media professionals savior. Chalk on the fact that there is a 5-year warranty…perfection. Last but not least, we need to consider value. Right now at Amazon, the Sabrent Rocket Q 8TB NVMe SSD is listed at $1504.55. Up until now, you would NEVER find an 8TB SSD, much less one at this price. It equates to .18/GB which is a great price point for a relatively ‘niche’ SSD capacity.

The Sabrent Rocket Q is an excellent, cost-effective drive for read-heavy workloads (nearly all consumer activities). The use of QLC flash lets them achieve price points that beat any TLC SSD on the market. Even at its low price you get a DRAM cache chip, which ensures random write performance is good. Paired with the extremely large SLC cache, this results in impressive random write performance, which is also reflected in our real-life tests (WinRAR).