Sabrent Rocket 5 PCIe Gen5 2TB M.2 SSD Review

How Much Does it Cost?

The Sabrent Rocket 5 M.2 NVMe SSD 2TB is a rare beast, as so often we get fancy and high-end storage and memory, and you can’t find it in stock anywhere. Alas, this drive is for sale in plenty of stores, and we even found it on Amazon Prime for £184.99 for the 1TB, £329.99 for the 2TB, and £719.98 for the 4TB. If you just coughed up your liver when I told you the price, I am sorry, but Gen5 drives are expensive, and this being one of the biggest and best, well, the price is actually pretty competitive, but I won’t pretend it isn’t a heck of a lot of money.

Overview

Sabrent sells this drive with one simple fact on the retail page, that this is “our Fastest SSD Ever” and they really aren’t fooling around, as it’s much faster than the last generation, delivering double the read and write performance of their Gen4 drives, which is just incredible, as Gen4 drives are still plenty fast. Especially when you consider a SATA SSD tops out around 500 MB/s and this drive is running at over 14000 MB/s, it’s a bigger hardware leap than going from HDD to SSD ever was.

The build quality of these drives is exceptional, but then again, you can only get these top speeds from the latest and greatest components anyway. The Phison controller is well proven now, the SK Hynix memory is more refined than ever, and these newer drives don’t even run as hot as the first-generation Gen5 drives we saw last year.

With optimisations for DirectStorage, extremely fast response times, extremely fast read and write times, and large capacity options, these drives are the storage gamers dream about. The only downside is waiting for your friends to load in, as you’ll absolutely be in the game before they are.

The same goes for content creation, if you’re scrubbing through massive assets and 4K video files, rendering, copying, etc, then that speed is going to be a blessing. Having your system stutter, hang or simply “load” is a pain in the ass when you’re trying to be productive, but with 14GB/s read speeds, there’s not really a lot out there that doesn’t load virtually instantly.

Should I Buy One?

When only the best will do, the Sabrent Rocket 5 is one of the absolute finest SSDs on the market right now, and while it is expensive, it is pretty competitive in the market of extreme drives. When it comes to flagship performance, this is it right here, and maybe if you can convince yourself that time is money in regards to how long CoD takes to load, you could treat yourself to this amazing bit of kit.