Sabrent Rocket 1TB SSD Review – TLC NAND Flash

By Nathan Kirsch

AJA System Test and PCMark 8

AJA System Test:

AJA System Test by AJA Video Systems measures system disk performance using video test files of different resolutions, sizes and codecs. We selected the standard 4K UltraHD resolution, a test file size of 1GB and the ProRes 4444 codec to see how this drive does with regard to video rendering performance. ProRes 4444 is used for heavy effects work and deep color projects. The results from this benchmark help content creators with regards to rendering expectations, throughput, file read/write expectations for transfers and that kind of thing.

Sabrent Rocket 1TB Aja System Test

Benchmark Results: The AJA System Test results on the Sabrent Rocket 1TB drive was shown to average 2,830 MB/s read and 2,725 MB/s write. There were virtually no dips on the write size as you can see with the disk writes over time chart.

PCMark 8:

PCMark 8 might have come out in 2013, but it is still a very popular storage benchmark and some would argue that it is the industry standard for SSDs. We ran the Storage 2.0 benchmark test suite on PCMark 8 v2.10.901 that came out in May 2018. This update accommodates a change in the latest version of Adobe After Effects and provides better support for NVMe SSDs. The changes affect the workloads in the Adobe Applications benchmark and the Storage 2.0 benchmark. Scores from the new versions of these tests should not be compared with older versions, so just a heads up if you wanted to compare our scores to that on another site.

The primary result of each storage test is the total time elapsed while playing back the trace. The primary result is used to calculate Storage score. The secondary result of the test is bandwidth, which is the total amount of bytes read and written during the test divided by busy time (in other words, the time when the depth of the queue of pending I/O operations was at least 1). The bandwidth result is used to calculate Storage bandwidth, which is reported along with Storage score and we are most interested in this score.

Benchmark Results: The Sabrent Rocket 1TB Drive completed the PCMark 8 storage 2.0 benchmark workload with an overall score of 5,076 points and a bandwidth result of 530.78 MB/s. This test score was a little lower than we expected, so we ran it twice more and got scores slightly lower. Maybe the Sabrent firmware is slightly different than other drives that use the Phison E12 controller.

We like the Storage 2.0 Bandwidth test results as it shows the total amount of bytes read and written during the test divided by the time the test took. The Sabrent Rocket 1TB SSD had a storage bandwidth score of 536.4 MB/s.

That puts the Sabrent Rocket lower than we expected compared to other NVMe drives as that is really strange as it was performing on par with the Patriot Viper VPR100 up until this point. The Sabrent Rocket 1TB drive that we are testing uses the Phison E12S controller with BiCS4 96-layer TLC NAND Flash whereas the Patriot Viper VPR100 RGB uses the Phison E12 controller with 64-layer TLC NAND Flash, so that might have something to do with the results on this one particular benchmark.