Sabrent unveils a massive 8TB NVMe PCIe 3.0 internal SSD

[Humza]

In a nutshell: Sabrent has expanded its Rocket Q family of 500GB, 1TB, 2TB, and 4TB drives with a new model that offers a mighty 8 terabytes of super-fast storage in the same M.2 2280 form-factor by utilizing Micron's 3D QLC NAND technology.

In what is possibly a world first, Sabrent has come up with the most capacious NVMe PCIe 3.0 M.2 SSD. The Rocket Q 8TB should make storage shortage worries a thing of the past, provided you've got the deep pockets for purchasing the drive once it becomes available.

Spec-wise, Sabrent is using the same Phison E12S controller here that's used across its Rocket Q family and notes PCIe 3.1 and NVMe 1.3 compliance for the M.2 PCIe Gen3 x4 drive.

Although the company hasn't officially listed transfer speeds for this model (as of writing), it's safe to assume that it will match the 3,400MB/s reads and 3,000MB/s writes of its 4TB sibling, and similar to what Crucial is offering for its new (but less capacious) P5 series.

There's also no word around the drive's random read and write IOPS, but they're expected to exceed all of Sabrent's previous offerings in this series. Other details for the drive include support for SMART and TRIM commands, as well as advanced wear-leveling, bad block management, and over-provisioning features.

Sabrent also bundles the drive with Acronis True Image cloning software and is yet to decide on its price and availability. Considering that the Rocket Q 4TB currently costs $760 on Sabrent's official website, expect to pay nearly double or more for the upcoming 8TB version.

Permalink to story.

https://www.techspot.com/news/85321-sabrent-unveils-massive-8tb-nvme-pcie-30-internal.html

 

[neeyik]

It's worth noting that the Rocket Q series all use Micron's QLC NAND flash:

QLC NAND flash memory

Micron's industry leading QLC NAND flash memory technology embraces read-centric needs and unlocks the value of your data.

www.micron.com

Weird that Micron/Crucial don't offer anything bigger than 2 TB.

 

[Lionvibez]

QLC no buy.

 

[BadThad]

Free Acronis, excellent cloning software! Too bad not all mfgs offer it for free with a drive.

 

[QuantumPhysics]

QLC no buy.

why?

 

[neeyik]

Endurance rating decreases as you go SLC > MLC > TLC > QLC, by roughly an order of magnitude 10 times lower. But as QLC gives you, potentially, much higher storage capacity, you can offset this by use of over-provisioning and wear algorithms in the controller.

Edit: Oh, and I forgot that QLC has the lowest continuous write limits of all the types - I.e. the write performance is fine up until you hit the write limit (something like 40 GB, I think) and then it absolutely tanks. I use a QLC nvme drive just for my Steam folder - big storage and fast reads are a big plus, and the slow writes don't bother me. Nothing else is stored on it, so when it dies, it's no big deal.

 

[QuantumPhysics]

My shopping trigger is when Samsung and Crucial 2TB SSD drop below $200. I always end up buying one. I don't care about the technology they use so long as I don't have a drive failure and so long as - if I do - it's warrantied. Thus far, I've used Samsung and Crucial with no problem whatsoever.

I've never purchased Sabrent, but a 4TB or 8TB SSD already has my attention. If they could somehow get that to me for $1000, I'd buy it today. My travel gaming laptop would absolutely love it.

At current, I had my eyes set on two Intel 660p 2TB M.2 SSD.

 

[neeyik]

I've never purchased Sabrent, but a 4TB or 8TB SSD already has my attention. If they could somehow get that to me for $1000, I'd buy it today.

https://www.sabrent.com/product/SB-...ernal-ssd-high-performance-solid-state-drive/ - $759.99

Edit: That's almost double the price of two 660p SSDs though.

 

[VitalyT]

If you value capacity + reliability over pure speed, then you will be better off purchasing 3 x SATA-3 SSD from Samsung, for the same money, and configuring them into RAID 5.

You will end up with the same 8TB of usable space, with proper loss-resilience, about 1.1GB/s read speed and 900MB/s write speed.

Also worth noting, these days people completely forgot about 12Gb SAS SSD-s, many of which are available these days, plus adapters are cheap, and include good RAID support.

For example, here's RAID controller with 8 x 12Gb SAS ports.
And here's an excellent SAS SSD for it from Toshiba.

You can get one hell of a PC setup, with tons of space, incredible speed, and perfect reliability, using RAID 5. And it won't cost an arm and a leg, like with a single 8TB Sabrent drive, plus you can scale your SAS over time.

 

[Lionvibez]

Endurance rating decreases as you go SLC > MLC > TLC > QLC, by roughly an order of magnitude 10 times lower. But as QLC gives you, potentially, much higher storage capacity, you can offset this by use of over-provisioning and wear algorithms in the controller.

Edit: Oh, and I forgot that QLC has the lowest continuous write limits of all the types - I.e. the write performance is fine up until you hit the write limit (something like 40 GB, I think) and then it absolutely tanks. I use a QLC nvme drive just for my Steam folder - big storage and fast reads are a big plus, and the slow writes don't bother me. Nothing else is stored on it, so when it dies, it's no big deal.

That use case is the only one I would consider a QLC drive for too store my Steam games. You will only be writing to the drive when installing new games. However alot of new games will blow well pass that 40GB mark, Example the free copy of GTA V on epic. So I would expect slower writes towards the end of that install.

To go past 2TB on TLC is expensive so that is why there are 2TB+ on QLC.

For now I just prefer to RAID 0 normal SATA ssd for my games storage.

So have two 1 TB Samsung Evo 860 drives in Raid 0 currently for that purpose.

 

[krizby]

Lol why buy a 750usd Nvme drive that takes years to fill when you could just spend 150usd for 1TB drive then spend another 150usd for 2TB in the next year then 150usd for 4TB the year after that. By the time I spend all that 750usd I would have 31TB SSD in my PC.

And any workstation that actually need 8TB of SSD storage are not that friendly with QLCs anyways...

 

[Lionvibez]

Lol why buy a 750usd Nvme drive that takes years to fill when you could just spend 150usd for 1TB drive then spend another 150usd for 2TB in the next year then 150usd for 4TB the year after that. By the time I spend all that 750usd I would have 31TB SSD in my PC....

I think most people would perfect to be working with one drive instead multiple. He did say he is looking at it to store games.

 

[neeyik]

That use case is the only one I would consider a QLC drive for too store my Steam games. You will only be writing to the drive when installing new games. However alot of new games will blow well pass that 40GB mark, Example the free copy of GTA V on epic. So I would expect slower writes towards the end of that install.

And this is indeed what happens - I recently had to re-install Assassin's Creed Odyssey for an article, and at 98 GB it was well over the write limit. However, since the download speed was a near constant 75 Mbps, the write limit didn't really slow down the installation that much. Sure, you could see the write speed was less than 150 MB/s in the latter stages, via Task Manager, but the reality is that the performance of QLC is perfectly acceptable for the vast majority of home users.

 

[krizby]

I think most people would perfect to be working with one drive instead multiple. He did say he is looking at it to store games.

Nothing stop you from installing games on multiple drives though, my steam libraries span across 3 SSDs that I have, and I bought one SSD each year .
Kinda crazy to spend too much on SSD when they are easily expandable and cost 1/2 every year.

 

[Lionvibez]

Nothing stop you from installing games on multiple drives though, my steam libraries span across 3 SSDs that I have, and I bought one SSD each year .
Kinda crazy to spend too much on SSD when they are easily expandable and cost 1/2 every year.

Yes that works for you.

I don't want to have games spread across multiple drives.

 

[Uncle Al]

LOL .... the patient buyer will get a real steal in another 24 months .....

 

[Squid Surprise]

Lol why buy a 750usd Nvme drive that takes years to fill when you could just spend 150usd for 1TB drive then spend another 150usd for 2TB in the next year then 150usd for 4TB the year after that. By the time I spend all that 750usd I would have 31TB SSD in my PC.

And any workstation that actually need 8TB of SSD storage are not that friendly with QLCs anyways...

Many motherboards only let you install a fixed number of M.2 / Nvme drives. Plus many people need the space NOW - not in a few years.

I have about 30-40TB of stuff on my desktop now - and I'm sure there are plenty of people who have far more than that... I wonder though, when a PCIe 4.0 8TB drive comes out, making this one seem "cheap" in comparison.

 

[krizby]

Many motherboards only let you install a fixed number of M.2 / Nvme drives. Plus many people need the space NOW - not in a few years.

I have about 30-40TB of stuff on my desktop now - and I'm sure there are plenty of people who have far more than that... I wonder though, when a PCIe 4.0 8TB drive comes out, making this one seem "cheap" in comparison.

Well if you need that much space then you would either have a workstation or at least a pcie x16 add-in board for m.2 drives.
I wouldn't put that much data on QLC SSD though, seems like a risk down the line. Even if it's just for games, you may lose all your save files when the drive has an unexpected failure. The more you have the more you lose ...

 

[Squid Surprise]

Well if you need that much space then you would either have a workstation or at least a pcie x16 add-in board for m.2 drives.
I wouldn't put that much data on QLC SSD though, seems like a risk down the line. Even if it's just for games, you may lose all your save files when the drive has an unexpected failure. The more you have the more you lose ...

No... plenty of people don't have workstations and have plenty of storage.... but even so, there are limited slots available for hard drives.... for many, the larger the better... And as for backups - that's what NAS is for... for that, you don't need SSDs and can simply buy a bunch of 12TB (or bigger) drives....

 

[Draconian]

This is great news. I've been waiting for more 8TB SSDs to become available.

There's not much available for 8TB SSDs in the consumer market.

Gigabyte makes an 8TB PCI-E add-in card that sells for $1,900 (!!!!)
(Search for GP-ASACNE6800TTTDA on Amazon)

Micron makes two 8TB SATA SSDs. The "Micron 5200 ECO" uses TLC and sells for $1,250 and the "Micron 5210 Ion" uses QLC and sells for $850.

 

[DimsumDynamite]

Is there a site that lists NVMe M.2 drives (past and present) and whether they are SLC / MLC / TLC / QLC?

 

[TheBigT42]

QLC NAND ... No thank you