The Sabrent Rocket Q 8TB SSD was designed for just that: a QLC. The high-density quad-level cell memory was specifically created to allow for higher capacity SSDs without the high costs associated with faster NAND memory types. Yes, finally the best SSDs can now be huge without having to pay through the nose for them. How much does this 8TB PCIe drive cost? Wait a minute. Nah, forget it...

Yes, $1,500 for an SSD, especially one with the slowest and weakest NAND memory type known to storage, is high. This is more than the price of an Nvidia RTX 2080Ti, which already seems like a lot of money. However, it is still a pretty chunky graphics card, so it feels like you are getting something tangible for your cash.

This slice of gum-sized silicon and printed circuit board. I wonder. That's a tough one.

But that's not all. Total cost of ownership may be difficult, but it makes sense. This is an expensive SSD, but on a price/GB level, the Sabrent Rocket Q 8TB is about as affordable as you can get in today's high-performance solid state storage. You might think that's a silly thing to say in the face of a product that could potentially cost more than the PC you're gaming right now, but we're talking 8TB here; we're talking 8,000GB of storage. Calculating this at a price per gigabyte, that means a mere 19 cents per gigabyte of capacity.

Well, if you actually have 8,000GB. But that is a whole other bit of brain bending math and over-provisioning, and we will come at it in a bit.

Not to mention that 8TB PCIe drives are currently unprecedented; Sabrent's Rocket Q 4TB is the largest NVMe SSD we've seen to this point, and Samsung has released an 8TB version in their new 870 QVO SSD, but still still falls short of the all-around package this Sabrent drive can offer.

As mentioned at the beginning, it's all about QLC memory technology and why Sabrent uses it better than any other QLC drive we've seen, even other NVMe SSDs.

Without getting too bogged down in details, QLC is effectively 4-bit NAND; the original kind of NAND flash memory used in SSDs was single-level cells (SLC), which can hold one bit per cell. Multi-level cells (MLC) were later introduced to increase density and reduce price, providing two bits per cell. Triple-level cells were then introduced, and now quad-level cells, and even pentalevel cells are on the horizon.

The more bits stored in a cell, the lower the performance and the lower the endurance level of the drive. To solve the performance problem, MLC, TLC, and QLC SSDs allocate a portion of the drive to be used only as SLC for storage operations, transferring data to the QLC portion of the drive when it is no longer in use.

With standard SSDs, the amount of SLC cache used is relatively small, which means that the cache will quickly saturate with large transfers, so you will experience the true performance of QLC in the middle of copying a game installation, which can be slow . However, on this 8TB drive, the cache is about a quarter of the available capacity, so you will need to transfer more than 2TB of data before you begin to see signs of a QLC memory performance cliff.

Essentially, this QLC drive behaves virtually like an SLC SSD for just about everything most humans use this drive for. It is also extremely fast due to its PCIe 3.0 NVMe interface.

Inevitably, it doesn't match the speeds you can get from PCIe 4.0 SSDs like the Sabrent Rocket, but it is on par with the 970 EVO Plus, the fastest consumer Samsung SSD available today. It lags a bit behind in raw numbers, but not in a way that makes a tangible difference in PC setup. There will soon be a Samsung 980 Pro (and EVO) with more enhanced PCIe 4.0 drives, but that is still a long way off and the chances of finding an SSD with an 8TB capacity are slim to none.

With NVMe SSDs loaded with high-performance NAND flash memory, you won't have to worry about the potential heat generated by the controller running at full capacity to keep it in use. Throughout my testing, which included both traditional real-world file transfers as well as lengthy synthetic storage tests, the Sabrent Rocket Q 8TB never exceeded 59°C

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I am greatly impressed with Sabrent's recent SSD efforts. We have seen their drives appear in the affordable end of the solid state spectrum, but were not necessarily convinced that they were a cut above the slower, budget SSDs. But from the PCIe 4.0 Rocket to the QLC Rocket Q, these are clearly high-quality drives, so we put them to the test.

We have not been big fans of QLC since its introduction. The first Samsung 860 QVO drives were painfully slow, and that hasn't changed with the latest Samsung 870 QVO. Nor did the Crucial P1 and P2 SSDs give us any confidence that QLC is the future of low-cost high-density storage. With Rocket Q, however, things are different. While a large part of this is due to the weight of the capacity (and these little SSDs are really heavy), the combination of memory, the Phison controller, and firmware certainly helps.

However, I still can't help but feel a little disappointed and a little underwhelmed. I was there to marvel at the massive storage offered by this amazing 8TB drive, and yet I was upset that there was only 6.98TB of available storage.

This is a full terabyte or more MIA. Given that this drive is priced at $1,500, that means $190 worth of SSD capacity is unavailable.

But this is not a problem with the Sabrent Rocket Q itself, but with SSDs and storage in general, thanks to a mix of overprovisioning and frustrating math. Small storage drives appear to have less capacity than advertised in Windows; for a 1TB SSD, the actual usable capacity is about 930GB, or 475GB for a 512GB drive. The problem is that for an 8TB drive, the extent of pre-chewed capacity becomes more apparent due to its sheer scale.

There is still a percentage of over-provisioning as seen with many drives, plus there is a mathematical problem: 8TB is not really 8,000GB, nor is it 8,000,000MB. Bytes are not divided by 1000; they are divided by 1024. There is a reason for this. Yet, both in marketing materials and in the operating system itself, the two are constantly confused.

You don't actually lose anything special by using a high-capacity drive. However, 6.98 terabytes is still a lot of storage. And with this latest Sabrent Rocket Q, you get all that and blazingly fast speeds, despite what you might think about its feeble memory technology.