Sabrent Rocket Q4 and Corsair MP600 CORE NVMe SSDs Reviewed: PCIe 4.0 with QLC
by Billy Tallis on April 9, 2021 12:45 PM ESTConclusion
The Sabrent Rocket Q4, Corsair MP600 CORE and related drives form the first crop of QLC drives to support PCIe Gen4. It is clear from our testing that the PCIe Gen4 support doesn't automatically make these drives high-end. The Gen4 capability on these drives isn't a big deal for overall performance, though they are incrementally faster than most PCIe Gen3 QLC drives.
The Rocket Q4 and MP600 CORE definitely provide faster sequential transfer speeds than other QLC drives and entry-level TLC drives, but for random IO the Intel SSD 670p often steals the spotlight despite only supporting PCIe gen3 on its host interface. Optimizing for fast sequential IO is a great way to produce big numbers for marketing purposes, but the tradeoffs made by the Intel 670p seem for the most part to better for the real world.
These Gen4 QLC drives inherit the most notable problem with the Phison E16 controller - the high power consumption- and this adds on to the poor efficiency of QLC NAND. The combination still isn't particularly prone to overheating or thermal throttling during normal consumer use, but heatsinks do make more sense for these drives than on most M.2 SSDs currently shipping with fancy heatsinks. There's not much demand yet for PCIe Gen4 SSDs for notebooks, but these drives are definitely ill-suited to that role.
Previous QLC NVMe drives had already proven that QLC can be an acceptable route to mainstream NVMe performance, provided that the drive has a high enough capacity. The Rocket Q4 and MP600 CORE show that peak performance can be extended even further, but they don't do much to illustrate how worst-case performance can be improved to further reduce the downsides of QLC.
| NVMe SSD Price Comparison April 9, 2021 |
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| 500 GB | 1 TB | 2 TB | 4 TB | ||||
| Sabrent Rocket Q4 PCIe Gen4, QLC |
$149.98 (15¢/GB) |
$279.98 (14¢/GB) |
$689.98 (17¢/GB) |
||||
| Corsair MP600 CORE PCIe Gen4, QLC |
$154.99 (15¢/GB) |
$309.99 (15¢/GB) |
$644.99 (16¢/GB) |
||||
| Mushkin DELTA PCIe Gen4, QLC |
$159.99 (16¢/GB) |
$299.99 (15¢/GB) |
$599.99 (15¢/GB) |
||||
| Sabrent Rocket Q QLC |
$64.99 (13¢/GB) |
$109.98 (11¢/GB) |
$219.98 (11¢/GB) |
$599.98 (15¢/GB) |
|||
| Corsair MP400 QLC |
$109.99 (11¢/GB) |
$229.99 (11¢/GB) |
$593.99 (15¢/GB) |
||||
| Mushkin ALPHA QLC |
$569.99 (14¢/GB) |
||||||
| Intel SSD 670p QLC |
$69.99 (14¢/GB) |
$114.99 (11¢/GB) |
$249.99 (12¢/GB) |
||||
| Samsung SSD 980 DRAMless, TLC |
$69.99 (14¢/GB) |
$129.99 (13¢/GB) |
|||||
| WD Blue SN550 DRAMless, TLC |
$59.99 (12¢/GB) |
$109.99 (11¢/GB) |
|||||
| SK hynix Gold P31 TLC |
$74.99 (15¢/GB) |
$134.99 (13¢/GB) |
|||||
| WD Black SN750 TLC |
$69.99 (14¢/GB) |
$139.99 (14¢/GB) |
$299.99 (15¢/GB) |
$799.99 (20¢/GB) |
|||
As we saw with the TLC drives when the Phison E16 controller first brought PCIe 4 support to consumer SSDs, that extra bandwidth comes at a significant premium. For the more mainstream capacities, the E16 QLC drives are substantially more expensive than the PCIe Gen3 QLC drives using the older E12 controller, or even the recent Intel SSD 670p. However, at 4TB, the premium for Gen4 on a QLC drive is a lot smaller. Mainstream PCIe Gen3 TLC drives are also cheaper than the Gen4 QLC drives, for capacities below 4TB. At and above 4TB there really aren't many options, and almost all of the are QLC-based. It is disappointing that upgrading to PCIe Gen4 has so far precluded these Phison drives from offering the 8TB capacity that is available from Phison E12 drives. That will likely come as 28nm controllers make way for newer models on 12nm or smaller.
These Gen4 QLC SSDs are not a great general-purpose storage solution; they certainly don't combine PCIe Gen4 and QLC and come out with only the best advantages of each. But they are still suitable for some use cases, especially centered around higher capacities.
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allenb - Sunday, April 11, 2021 - link
This whining about QLC is an amazing mix of comedy and incompetence. Who cares about the storage medium? If your data is written to petrified goose excrement, what does it matter if the delivered performance meets your needs?Faceless corporations screw us over in plenty of legitimate ways. Why make up new things to get pissed off about?
Do the math or look at your actual usage data. Very few individuals are generating enough write traffic for endurance to be a concern. As others have stated here.
JoeDuarte - Sunday, April 11, 2021 - link
Bugs and bad software developers can cause significant degradation of SSD endurance. There was a bug in the Spotify desktop app a couple of years ago that caused massive writes, way beyond normal use, which affected SSD owners the most.And there are apparently issues with Apple's M1 Macbooks, though I haven't kept up. It might have been related to their stingy RAM allotment (8 GB), causing excessive SSD swap.
Endurance will matter when it's as bad as these drives, which is the worst I've ever seen.
Oxford Guy - Tuesday, April 13, 2021 - link
Probably nanosecond timestamps in APFS with various spyware running amok.edzieba - Monday, April 12, 2021 - link
Oh shush, next you'll be telling them that bus interface speed or heatsink presence/size is not an useful indicator of drive performance!ZolaIII - Friday, April 16, 2021 - link
Sure take an example of guy who likes to watch the movies on it's new TV. He whatches 50 movie a month. He takes 4K Blue-ray discs but wants to convert them to 4K HDR + HLG (H265 10 Bit HLG+) format to match the display capabilities as good as possible. In order to do that in real time he uses GPU conversion and as it sucks regarding quality he puts 2x higher bit rate doing so. Of course he first copy them to SSD. That's (50x50) GB x3 = 7.32 TB per month or almost 88 TB per year for one or two muvies every day. When you add rest it comes to at least 100 TB a year. Example is realistic with not to much or extensive usage and illustration of how QLC endurance simply is concerning.FunBunny2 - Saturday, April 17, 2021 - link
"almost 88 TB per year for one or two muvies every day. When you add rest it comes to at least 100 TB a year."well... such a knucklehead obviously doesn't have any time devoted to work, so s/he's either a rich real estate developer or a welfare queen/king. :)
ZolaIII - Sunday, April 18, 2021 - link
Why? If you work from 9 to 5 you don't have time to watch a movie or two (especially if you like watching movies)?DracoDan - Monday, April 19, 2021 - link
They should sell a single SSD that can be user configured as a 4TB QLC, 2TB TLC, 1TB MLC, or 512GB SLC SSD. That way the end user has the ability to decide the tradeoff for space vs performance!Billy Tallis - Tuesday, April 20, 2021 - link
Your math is off, possibly because of the common misunderstanding of the difference between the number of bits stored per memory cell and the number of possible voltage states required to represent those bits.It would be 4TB as QLC, 3TB as TLC, 2TB as MLC or 1TB as SLC. See the Whole-Drive Fill test which illustrates that the 4TB drive has up to 1TB of SLC cache.
xJumpManx - Monday, May 3, 2021 - link
If you have a X570 Taichi do not buy sabrent ssd the mobo does not detect the drive.