SABRENT ROCKET CFX 1TB Memory Card Review

Here at eTeknix we work with all sorts of media; from the images we use in our written reviews like the one you are reading now, to large raw video footage for use in our YouTube channel. It's safe to say that we appreciate storage more than the average person. In our office we have a large variety of storage options, but the most convenient is always going to be a mix of speed, capacity, and it's physical size. We use a variety of types of storage at the office, we use everything from SD cards to external SSDs, and for anything that doesn't need to have as fast of a speed, we have our NAS where we store resources and old footage. When it comes to external SSDs, we use these all the time with our 12K camera for videos, this is for the speed. When you don't have to worry about the speed of the storage, then you don't end up waiting on the storage to catch up. Big Things Come In Small Packages What we have today is easily the smallest 1TB I've ever held, I had thought that M.2 Drives were small, but this takes the biscuit. Whilst an M.2 has a speed advantage over the CFexpress format of this card, the CFexpress has the benefit of size, this form factor allows for a much wider set of uses. The way we will be using this card day to day is with our 12K camera. This much storage is a necessity when working with footage that kind of size. Let's put this all into a bit of context for you, because without experience with this kind of hardware, you may not know just how fast we can fill up storage devices. We film at 12K on our camera to allow ourselves some room in editing to make zooms and edits without losing quality. At the 12K resolution, we film in 30 frames per second, at a 12:1 compression ratio in a 16:9 aspect ratio. What does all this mean for our storage? Well, with all of this in consideration, we are estimated to be able to get a minimum of an hour of footage on a terabyte of storage. So it's safe to say that easy storage at high capacities makes all the difference for us. This is all well and good, but if the card doesn't actually perform well, then what is the point? That's what I'm for. I don't do any filming or editing, I do testing and writing. So to evaluate if these cards are worth it to us, I need to first see what kind of experience we can expect from these cards. Packaging & Unboxing The front of the box is very simple, it's a picture of the product, the name of the product and the Sabrent logo. Sabrent has been a little clever here by showing the capacity of the drive on the picture of the drive instead of having a separate print, helping keep the box a little cleaner looking. The back of the box is less simple than the front; on the back, there is a Sabrent logo, a barcode and some basic information on the product's certifications. On the inside of the outer box is a Sabrent staple, a highly premium feeling metal case for the product. A crucial part of using this card will be how you actually access in on a computer, so we will also be looking briefly at the reader that Sabrent provided to us. A Closer Look When we take the card out of the metal case, we can finally see it in the flesh. The card is made of a plastic body with metal plates on it that create a more premium look and a stronger design. There is a sticker on the front of the card that contains some information on the card, including what most people would care most about, the capacity. The back of the card features more metal shielding, this time the information is printed directly on the metal plate instead of a sticker. Taking a look at the pins, we can see a total of 21 pins. This amount of pins might seem excessive at first for a storage device you'd use in a camera; because of the capacity and speed of this type of drive, you need this many pins to take full advantage of it. This card is a CFexpress type B card, this means that it uses PCIe 3.0 x2 and can achieve almost 2GB/s. For the sake of comparison, here's the card is next to some other storage formats. This comparison shows how impressively small this card is, it's barely bigger than an SD card and features faster storage and higher capacities. Taking a brief look at the card reader in more detail, we see that it uses a USB type C interface to connect to a PC and includes the cables you need to do so, including an A to C cable and a C to C cable. Finally, we will quickly look at the card in the reader. The reader features a spring-loaded mechanism, so to remove the card you need to press it in gently to have it pop out. Preparation The drive will be formatted as NTFS with default settings, as most users will do. The quick format option isn’t used as that might affect the performance the first time data is written. Modern operating systems all take care of the TRIM command in the background and it isn’t something to worry about for regular users. However, for these reviews, I will add a waiting period between each benchmark to make sure that the TRIM command has been fully executed and finished. After all, we want a clear picture of the drive’s performance with minimal interference from the operating system. Data We will start with a typical benchmark analysis of the formatted drive with various fillage scenarios. However, depending on how a drive is built, the performance may differ depending on how much data it is already storing. The drive will be tested empty and at 25%, 50%, and 75% space usage for this area. We're using Anvil’s Storage Utilities, AS SSD Benchmark, and CrystalDiskMark for this part of the review. Application and Gaming Besides the synthetic fill tests, the drive is tested with 3DMark's storage benchmark to get real-world performance results for various gaming and application usages. Drive Conditioning Durability is a vital factor in NAND-based drives as the chips can only be rewritten so often before they’ll stop working properly. Modern SSDs come with wear-level algorithms to increase the lifetime and reduce this factor as much as possible. Where appropriate, we will test this using Anvil’s Storage Utilities. Following this conditioning process, all of the previous benchmarks will be run again in the same scenarios and the same order. Hardware ProcessorIntel Core i9 12900KMotherboardMSI MAG Z690 TOMAHAWK WiFi DDR4 MemoryCorsair Dominator Platinum RGB 2 x 8GB 3600MHz DDR4GraphicsGigabyte RTX 3080 Gaming OCBoot DeviceSeagate FireCuda 520 1TBPower SupplyCorsair RM850x 850WSoftwareWindows 10 Pro 21H1CoolerNoctua NH-D15S Chromax Black Software Anvil's Storage UtilitiesAS SSD BenchmarkATTO BenchmarkCrystalDiskMark3DMark Storage BenchmarkWindows 10 64 bit Anvil's Storage Benchmark Anvil's storage benchmark got us a peak read score of 814MB per second with a peak write speed of 675MB per second. These speeds are lower than advertised, but this is no reason to worry, I will go into detail on why this is in the conclusion, but for the remainder of the tests, keep in mind that the rated speed is higher than what we get on our PC. AS SSD Storage Benchmark AS SSD got sequential reads and writes that almost triple the speeds of the fastest SD cards that you can buy, for a professional application like what we use here at the office, this is already proving it's worth. ATTO Disk Benchmark ATTO took better advantage of the card and ended up with a peak speed of 1GB per second, this is a very good result for portable storage in such a small form factor. CrystalDiskMark We saw another 1GB per second in CrystalDiskMark, writes were slightly lower but were still in the 1GB range. 3DMark Storage Benchmark According to the storage benchmark in 3DMark, the overall performance of this drive was a little under half that of the average score for a gaming PC. The drives that would normally be used in this test would be internal SSDs, so the lesser performance is what we would expect from a drive like this. With that said, this drive's performance means that it could still be a viable option for external game storage, but at the higher price of this drive, you would probably be better off getting something else for that use case. 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.