INTRODUCTION

   For the past 13 years or so consumers looking for new primary storage media have had to choose between HDDs and SSDs with the former offering the best price/capacity ratio and the highest possible capacities while the latter clearly leading in performance and other features including durability and data integrity (at some point there also were hybrid models in the market but these didn't do very well). Now as expected it will be quite a bit of time before SSDs can finally catch up to HDDs in terms of price (even though i seriously doubt the gap will ever vanish completely) but at least lately we've seen an increase in storage capacities and even though SSDs are still behind in that as well (at least in the consumer market) things are starting to look good for people looking for high capacity models. One such model is the brand new and rather massive Rocket Q 8TB NVMe SSD by Sabrent which I’ve testing for just over 2 weeks now.

   Sabrent is a leading American manufacturer of computer peripherals and accessories, bringing uniquely styled quality products to consumers worldwide. Sabrent’s commitment is to offer the latest technology and the highest quality consumer electronic products at an affordable cost to everyone. Since its founding, Sabrent has consistently delivered to market a full line of computer peripherals and accessories that incorporate style, quality and the latest technologies available.

   Needless to say, the Rocket Q 8TB is the larger (higher capacity to be more accurate) brother of the 2TB model i reviewed a while back (review here) and thus it also makes use of QLC (quad-level cell) flash memory which as some of you already know may not be quite as fast or durable as TLC (not to mention MLC and SLC) but it's much more affordable and allows for much higher capacities something which is quite evident just by looking at the number 8. For this specific model Sabrent has used Micron's 96-layer QLC NAND flash memory along with 16GB of DDR3L DRAM by Kingston (for the 8TB model) and of course Phison's E12S eight-channel (32 CE targets) controller (RKT-303 as Sabrent likes to call it) which supports several current technologies like SLC caching, StrongECC, SmartRefresh, SmartFlush, LDPC (low density parity check), end-to-end data protection, thermal monitoring, AES-256 encryption, ONFi 2.3/3.0/3.2/4.0 and TCG Pyrite/OPAL support. As for endurance numbers Sabrent reports an MTBF (meantime between failure) of 1.8 million hours with a TBW (Terabytes Written) of 1800 (the entire Rocket Q line of SSDs is covered by a 5-year limited warranty via online registration).