SABRENT ROCKET CFX 1TB Memory Card Review

How Much Does it Cost?

At the time of writing, this card comes in at £497 in the UK and $490 in the US on Amazon. At this price, you can get much better deals for external PC storage, and for small form factor storage you could get an SD card; but those things defeat the point of this card, this card is about the speed and capacity.

Overview

You’d be forgiven for thinking that this card performs poorly given its advertised speed, but this isn’t actually a concern; throughout testing, we weren’t able to reach the full potential of the card because we were limited by both the speed of the connection to the PC and the speed of the card reader. When we account for the speed achievable by the reader, we see that the speeds we got were pushed right up against the limit of what we could get, and the speeds we got were still great in comparison to other small form factor media cards. But with the performance addressed, we need to talk about the elephant in the room, the price. Just under £/$500 is expensive for a terabyte, of storage, but is it expensive for this speed and size? Compared to a standard SD card, the general price I found was about £220/$270 for a terabyte, but the speed was only up to 170MB per second, so whilst we have the capacity, we don’t have the speed, so what about other drives? An external SSD of the same capacity can set you back around £/$100 and has speeds of up to 1GB per second, but now what we are missing out on is the small form factor that can go right into your camera. So the real way to look at it is that the price of this card is kind of justified, you get the speed, capacity and size of all the best options in those categories with a higher price as the compromise.

Should I Buy One?

The chances of you needing a card like this are pretty slim, and if you have a camera that can take advantage of it then you probably aren’t too concerned about the price of the card anyway. For anyone looking for an easy way to get lots of capacity, I wouldn’t recommend this, for anyone looking for bang for the buck, I obviously don’t recommend it. So who do I recommend this to? Well, I said it on the first page of this very article, I would recommend this card to a professional who works in media and has an expensive camera that can take advantage of something like this. If you are a professional videographer then I would easily recommend something like this to help speed up ingest of footage and prevent any writing issues when filming. Someone who does wedding photography for a living and can’t afford to miss or lose anything can take advantage of the capacity so they can be taking many photos to get everything they can.