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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.
| Hard Drive | 8 TB Solid State Drive |
|---|
