Sabrent Rocket Q 8TB PCIe NVMe M.2-2280 High Performance Internal Solid State Drive

This review is for the Sabrent Rocket Q 8TB NVMe PCIe M.2 2280 Internal SSD High Performance Solid State Drive R/W 3300/2900MB/s (SB-RKTQ-8TB) (Amazon needs to stop its despicable practice of combining reviews of what it considers to be similar products!).I was dismayed when I first received the SSD in a cheap, folded up bubble wrap envelope until I saw the package inside the envelope. Nothing there was especially remarkable until one opens the box and removes what is inside. Inside was a very sturdy, deep drawn, aluminum box about the size of a 2.5" SSD, except it's 13mm thick, with fairly dense removable foam padding to protect the SSD inside. One could drive a car over this box and not damage the SSD inside (or the box).I had no trouble formatting this as GPT ext4 for use in a Linux Mint laptop. Installation in the laptop was quick and easy.The SSD itself uses QLC NAND. Since more data is stored per cell, the SSD will have a shorter write life than TLC and MLC SSDs. Also, since each cell is more crowded, data leakage will start happening sooner than with TLC and MLC NAND. However, the TBW rating is still high enough that most people will never come close to exceeding the the TBW rating or experience data leakage during the five year warranty period.The warranty is one year when first purchased but can be upgraded for no charge to five years if the SSD is registered within 90 days of the purchase date. Registering also allows you to upload a copy of the receipt to be kept on file should you lose your copy, which is needed should you need to file a warranty claim.Despite the higher speed of NVMe drives over SATA, I do not recommend this drive for a boot drive unless your computer has room for only one drive and you also need the extraordinary capacity this drive offers. It's better suited for static data storage that is infrequently written but frequently read.I recommend this drive for compact, high capacity, relatively static data storage installed inside a computer. It would not be suitable for use as an external drive unless the drive was powered up frequently and mostly read rather than written to.I chose this drive over the only other 8TB SSD I'm aware of (a 2.5" SATA model), despite being QLC, for its longer warranty, large capacity, and because it allowed me to keep one of the 2.5" bays in my laptop free for another purpose. Once data has been written to the drive, it will be mostly read only with the only writes being when occasionally adding new data. Since the drive will be powered up frequently and have few writes, it should outlast the warranty without loss of data.My laptop is running on Linux Mint 19.3 booted from an MLC NVMe drive. I have a 4TB 2.5" MLC SSD for data frequently accessed, written, edited, and deleted.TRIM works on this drive. I'm currently populating the drive with data from two 4TB SSDs. To allow me to use my current 4TB SSD backup drives, I partitioned the drive into two equal sized partitions.It took around 18 hours to populate one partition with 3.225TB of data. Transfer speed from a 2.5" 4TB MLC SSD was throttled by SATA interface of the source drive so there was no speed advantage to be gained by the NVMe drive for me. Even when being read inside the computer, there will be no noticeable speed advantage unless working with enormous files (say 50GB-100GB or more), which I will not be doing. Drive temperature during population never exceeded 35°C with a 25.5° ambient temperature and no heat sink on the SSD.Normally, one wants to maintain 20-25% free space on an SSD to help ensure minimal fragmentation (yes, SSDs fragment but that will be kept to a level an SSD can easily handle as long as TRIM is enabled and there is plenty of free space on the drive). Generally, the more often a drive will be written to, the greater amount of free space one wants to maintain. Since my drive will be mostly read only, I can get away with maintaining the lower limit of free space. The one partition I have fully populated is only 80.6% full so there is plenty of free space there. The partition I'm currently slowly populating will not reach maximum usable capacity for quite some time.Even though I copied data from the source drive to the remaining partition on the Sabrent in fairly small batches to avoid overflowing the cache, I saw a noticeable slowdown in write speed as it approached 50% capacity. For my use, this won't be a problem because future writes will usually be under 10GB (very occasionally, up to 25GB) and will be one time events, the data then being read only after being written. It's still faster than SATA and is more than fast enough for watching movies.

Sadly I had high hopes for this drive as I was looking for a single drive solution vs multiple 2TB SSD's that I have currently, however, after ordering 3 of the 8TB and tested them all 3 seem to show the same symptoms and problems.The drive work great at the start but once you try to transfer any files, the NVMe drive gets so hot that its hard to touch, I have tried with active and non-active cooling enclosures and still the drives overheat so much that after about 30min to 1 hour of use the drive gets so hot that it auto ejects itself from my Macbook pro and takes about 5 min to cool down before it is fully functional again.Sadly one of the drives it seems got so hot that it doesn't connect anymore and I had to send it back. I have also tried this with multiple different cables (USB C and Thunderbolt, certain enclosure need to use Thunderbolt to get the full performance for this drive) however all lead to the same problems. I know this is a QLC and I was already worried about the reliability of these drives and sadly for me I don't think I will be leaning on this product and have to return all 3. I really wish it would have worked sadly I don't think these are ready yet for the market.

I love storage space. The more the better! It's frustrating that Nvmes have taken so long to advance in the amount of storage space, but I always want to be at the forefront. Lo and behold Sabrent's 8TB behemoth! Perfect timing just as I was getting rid of my desktop and going all in on a Dell XPS 15 9500 and eGPU setup.I've never bought a Sabrent drive as I am a Samsung and Western Digital fanboy, but I'll throw anyone under the bus if it means getting the best of the best. Additionally, based on Sabrent's products and reviews, they seem to be fairly well liked.After cutting my fingers and bleeding all over my new XPS 9500... I finally got the "way too hard for it's own good" bottom case off to get started on this epic install!8 hours later...Yup, it doesn't work. The current XPS 15 9500 BIOS doesn't support it. Thanks Uncle Dell!All the blood, sweat, and tears... literally... for nothing.So anyway, there's really not much to say about this drive... I'm sure if you have a compatible mobo you're all set for that glorious amounts of storage space. The one sketchy thing I will mention is that Sabrent claims that this item and their other Rocket Q drives are "almost exactly the same" (the drives with a darker ton instead of white)... apparently this is not the case. The darker toned Sabrent drives aren't just "a little fast" they also have much better longevity and longer warranty.With that said, I doubt I'll ever keep any drive long enough to ever see it at the end of its life cycle. But just throwing out the info in the ether in case anyone finds it helpful. Oh and one more thing... don't rock this thing without a heatsink. I couldn't measure temps because I couldn't boot, but when taking it on and off, I easily could have used it to cauterize my cut up fingers. This unit gets toasty.Best case scenario... I hope some other intrepid XPS 15 9500 owner out there who is hungry for 8TBs finds this information useful so you don't have to go through returning a $1500 item in USPS First Class... and bloody fingers. Worst case scenario, I just crushed your dreams.