Photos and Features

So the Rocket Q4 with heatsink has a nice picture of the drive with heatsink installed on the front of the main packaging. They have the capacity printed in the bottom right corner which is surprising, a lot of drives would save packaging and use a sticker for this to use the same packaging for all of the capacities. The front has the Sabrent logo up at the top and the model name which even includes NVMe in it in a large bold font up top. Around on the back, they have the capacity listed again. Then on the left, they break down the heatsink completely to show the three coil design for the heatpipes along with descriptions of each heatsink component.

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Once you get past the outer packaging though you will find two different boxes. The drive and heatsink both have retail packaging from when they are sold independently inside of the main box. They both have the white background again. The Rocket Q4 itself has a picture of the drive including its white and bronze trim on the front. Both boxes have the same large bold font with their product names on them again here and the drive also has a mode in-depth description below it that lets you know that this is a Gen 4 drive as well. There is a sticker letting you know Acronis True Image is included for free then the 2TB capacity down in the corner. The Rocket Q4 box opens up with ANOTHER box inside. Just like past Sabrent drives, the Rocket Q4 has a metal tin that keeps it safe, this time with the bronze finish to match the drive with a sticker that has a picture of the drive on the front including capacity. Inside there is a thick foam tray with the M.2 drive inside and a small foam pad that sits on top with the Rocket Q4 name on it. Then an installation guide is also included as well.

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With the packaging out of the way, I could finally check out the Rocket Q4 itself. If it wasn’t obvious before, this is an M.2 drive, specifically a 2280 M.2 drive which is the standard length for M.2 SSDs. It has a black PCB which is visible mostly on the back where Sabrent has put a smaller sticker. This sticker has a QR code to scan and has your serial number on it. They also have the drive capacity as well as the model number and the regulator certification logos all here, hidden away on the back of the drive when it is installed. On the front, it has a full-length sticker which in normal Sabrent fashion is a metal-backed sticker. So if you remove it, it is impossible to get it off without damaging at least some. The metal backing here has a bronze color and they use that for the Sabrent swishes, name, and the rocket/capacity on the far right.

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With the sticker pulled off the top and back, we can finally see what all the drive has going on. In the first picture below you can see that the bottom side isn’t completely void like some M.2 drives. They did slip in one SKhynix ram chip on the left with the model number H5AN8G8NCJ which is an 8GB DDR4 DRAM. On the right side of the back, there are also two NAND which were hidden under the half sticker. There are both etched with IA7HG66AWA which is the same NAND that we saw on the first Rocket Q drive. They are Micron 96L QLC and or 2TB capacity with two NAND on the back and two on the front tells us that this configuration gets 512GB per NAND. Speaking of the other two on the top of the drive you can see the same dual NAND chips on the right and on the far left a matching DRAM as well for their cache. Between them is what sets the Rocket Q4 apart from the original Rocket Q. The original had a Phison ps5012 controller where the Rocket Q4 has a PCIe Gen 4 controller. The chip has Sabrent branding and Rocket 4.0 on it as well as a PH-SBT-RKT-401 model number but from what I can tell this is a Phison PS5016-E16 controller.

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The other half of the Rocket Q4 with heatsink is the heatsink itself. It comes in its own box with cut foam with a spot for the heatsink, a screwdriver, and all five screws. The fifth is a mounting screw for the M.2 if you need it. There is also an installation guide as well.

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The heatsink is split up into a few pieces. The base is aluminum in a U shape, this goes under the drive and is what everything attaches to. This has a thermal pad installed to get heat from the bottom of the drive. Then the top section has three oval heatpipes that pull heat from right on top of the drive up into the aluminum head spreader up on the top. In between heat heatpipe is more aluminum to soak up heat and give the heatsink more structure. This comes with a thermal pad installed as well but I pulled it off to check out the bottom of the heatsink. You can see the heatpipes oval shape starts here with a split in the middle. They do include an additional thermal pad with the heatsink if your pad ends up damaged like ours did when taking it off. You can see on the heatsink just how well it stuck.

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The Rocket Q4 with the heatsink installed. The heatsink is at least three times at tall as the heatsink WD uses for the SN750 w/Heatsink. Even with a smaller heatsink fitment is always a concern, you do need to make sure your motherboard will support a tall heatsink without getting in the way of PCIe devices which often run over top of M.2 drives. That is assuming the motherboard doesn’t have a built-in heatsink which a lot of them do, especially X570 boards which are where you are going to get PCIe Gen 4 support right now.

 

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