The 4TB Sabrent Rocket Q NVMe is one of the largest NVMe drives available today, but its fame is about to be overtaken by a drive twice as large from the same company. In fact, it is being released by the same family. Yes, the Sabrent Rocket Q 8TB NVMe SSD is coming.

I was going to start by talking about how storage keeps getting bigger and faster, and how far we've come, etc. The fact is, storage is moving at a very fast pace right now, and just when you think you've got the biggest and the best, something even bigger or even faster or both is sure to come along. And that's before we even consider how the high-speed storage in Sony's PlayStation 5 is going to revolutionize the market.

The good news is that here at PC Gamer, we don't look at technology for its own sake; it should be something that delivers benefits. In the case of this SSD, the big benefit is that 4 terabytes of super-fast NVMe storage fits into a gum-sized package. In fact, the only thing stopping my jaw from dropping to the floor is knowing that an 8TB version is on the way. Regardless, my jaw is still a little flabby.

The reason Sabrent was able to achieve such high capacities is the use of QLC memory, a level of NAND flash designed with high capacity drives in mind. Quad-level cell flash memory has been around for a little while and is the next logical step after TLC (triple-level cell) flash, where essentially each cell holds four bits of data, as opposed to three bits (TLC), two bits (DLC), or the original one bit (SLC). [Because each cell can hold more data, the drive itself can hold more data. However, this has its drawbacks: writing to the cells takes longer (tends to be slower than a TLC drive), and the endurance is not as high as a TLC drive. This lower endurance is somewhat offset by the larger capacity of this drive. It will probably take a long time to fill up this 4TB model.

Sabrent offers a healthy 5-year warranty on this drive, but to get the most out of it, you will need to sign up for an extended warranty. You only have 90 days from the date of purchase to apply for the extended warranty.

Nevertheless, Sabrent estimates 940TBW (Terabytes Written) for this 4TB drive, which equates to 527GB writes per day over the five-year warranty period.

Sabrent provides a link to Acronis True Image on the drive, making it easy to transfer an existing system to the drive if you don't think it's a good time to install a new Windows installation. One can also download the Sabrent Toolbox from the official website, which provides SMART monitoring information, displays the drive's current temperature, and provides firmware updates.

Drive temperature monitoring is helpful because the Rocket Q can get warm during use; in PCMark 10 storage tests, peak temperatures reached 62°C (142°F). This is not much of a concern, especially if there is good ventilation in the system, but should be noted. No heatsinks are included, but the Gigabyte X570 Aorus Master we used for testing has heatsinks above the M.2 slots.

It's a small thing, but the fact that the Rocket Q ships in a small can convinced me a bit before I even got close to my test rig. It doesn't affect the review, but it gives me the feeling that I'm getting something that has been lovingly crafted, not just tossed in. Of course, I'm not quite sure what I'll do with this tin after I buy it, but that doesn't detract from the pleasure of opening the box.

The Rocket Q NVMe drive uses the popular Phison E12S controller, which Sabrent has paired with Micron QLC memory. Both of these are well-established components, and combined they should make a decent little drive. And sure enough, the performance we saw in our tests was impressive.

In the composite benchmark, sequential reads and writes were good at 2.9GB/s and 2.8GB/s, respectively. This may not challenge the best NVMe SSDs such as the Samsung 970 Evo Plus or WD Black SN750, but it is not far behind. Since this is a PCIe Gen 3.0 drive, it cannot match the raw throughput of a Gen 4 drive like the Corsair MP600, which can achieve almost 5GB/s.

Performance in the 4K random test is more impressive, placing this drive at the top of the benchmark table. This is somewhat surprising for a QLC drive, but the fact that this drive is a fully implemented controller while the other drives are smaller 1TB drives helps explain this to some extent.

This strong performance was also demonstrated in a real-world test (a Steam installation with mixed file types) where 30GB of data was transferred across the entire drive and processed in 2 minutes 19 seconds. This equates to 221 MB/sec, putting Rocket Q at the top of the benchmark. This equates to 221 MB/sec, putting the Rocket Q at the top of our benchmark. It may only be a few seconds faster than the other drives we tested, but this is an impressive lead for a technology that is supposed to be slow.

Overall, the 4TB Sabrent Rocket Q NVMe SSD is one of the most impressive NVMe SSDs you can buy today. Yes, it is expensive, but it is so large that you can forget about installing games on a slower data drive and always enjoy the best performance. And if your budget doesn't stretch this far, we recommend buying the 2TB drive (£220/$280).