Sabrent's new Rocket 4 Plus Destroyer PCIe card: 32TB PCIe 4.0 Nvme @ 28GB/sec

[Pitboy64]

Summary

Sabrent Rocket 4 Destroyer - PCIe 4.0 card that holds
8x4TB (total 32TB) PCIe 4.0 Nvme drives ... in raid0
Runs at 28GB/Sec ... thats 28 GB per second, read and write.
 

Quotes

Quote

"28GB/sec (or 28,000MB/sec) run by our own in-house Storage God, Jon Coulter, who has hands-on with Sabrent's wicked-fast Rocket 4 Plus Destroyer SSD. What we have here are 8 x Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus SSDs on Highpoint's new FnL AIC NVMe RAID card."

 

My thoughts

 Strikes me as pure Linus material.  These kinds of speeds are unheard of, and might just show what PCIe 4.0 is capable of ... and considering what they have been doing lately, I'm not surprised its Sabrent doing it.

 

Sources

Sabrents tweeted this article on their own twitter page themselves
Tweaktown:
Read more: https://www.tweaktown.com/news/80579/sabrents-new-rocket-4-plus-destroyer-32tb-ultra-fast-ssds-28gb-sec/index.html

[RejZoR]

It not only destroys the benchmarks, it also destroys your wallet.

~Sabrent probably

[Pitboy64]

1 minute ago, RejZoR said:

It not only destroys the benchmarks, it also destroys your wallet.

~Sabrent probably

Yup.
Article says $1K for each drive and another one or so for just the card.
Definitely in the 'interesting cutting edge, but not for my rig' department.

[mariushm]

yeah, what they don't point out is that they could have achieved those numbers with just 4 SSDs 

 

The pci-e x16 slot gives them 16 x 1970 = 31520 MiB/s or 30 GiB/s of bandwidth. 

 

The individual drives can do 6-7 GB/s reads ... so 4 x 6= 24 GiB/s already. 

 

So the speeds are high, but not really exciting. 

 

They take a Broadcom switch / raid controller for the server market and they slap it on the card along with a bunch of dc-dc converters to get 3.3v for the m.2 drives and they pretend they invented bread.

It's not even Sabrent, it's a Highpoint controller card, unless Sabrent bought Highpoint lately.

 

[Icarus_Radio]

One drive failure and your entire data goes poof

[Sauron]

1 hour ago, mariushm said:

The individual drives can do 6-7 GB/s reads

sequential writes aren't everything. even if 4 drives could achieve the same sequential write speeds they probably couldn't reach the same random IOps.

[mariushm]

It would have been nice to have support for a 8-16 GB SO-DIMM DDR4 stick and a bunch of capacitors as power backup. 

[StDragon]

 Nope, not fast enough.

 

Spoiler

sarcasm 

 

[Doobeedoo]

That's awesome, though I'm sure other top SSDs would also do such when stacked, like Samsung 980 Pro for example.

[StDragon]

Putting these in some VMWare ESXi host servers configured in a vSAN would rock!

[Lurick]

Sabrent can go pound sand.

They gave me the runaround after one of their drives completely died. "Oh you need to provide X, Y, Z diagnostics from the drive". The drive died, it doesn't show up in my system, how in the world do you expect me to give you something from a drive that doesn't work?!?! "Oh well we can't help you until you get us that information, have you tried another computer?" WTF?!?

This is of course after it took me TWO MONTHS to register on their shit support site to get support, their socials completely ghosted me when I tried reaching out in the mean time for help. The site would say a confirmation email would be sent, they never send one, you just have to know to ignore that and log in. I gave up on them after that horrible support exchange.

[jasonvp]

20 minutes ago, Lurick said:

Sabrent can go pound sand.

It's puzzled me why none of the other NVMe makers (namely the champ: Sammy) have bothered trying to make drives with the same capacities as Sabrent has.  I have no first hand experience with their hardware, but that seems a bit suss to me.

 

[Lurick]

Just now, jasonvp said:

It's puzzled me why none of the other NVMe makers (namely the champ: Sammy) have bothered trying to make drives with the same capacities as Sabrent has.  I have no first hand experience with their hardware, but that seems a bit suss to me.

 

Yah, and I should say I have a PCIe 4.0 drive from them that's been working flawlessly. This was a larger capacity PCIe 3.0 drive that I got but still miffed at the "support" I received. When they work they work well but beyond that good luck if you have issues.

[Beskamir]

14 hours ago, Icarus_Radio said:

One drive failure and your entire data goes poof

Only if you're using raid0 which as I found out while trying to mine Arweave, doesn't actually help with random read/writes so aside from being bragging rights there's really no reason to use raid0. Especially cause everyday performance relies more on random read/writes than sequential read/writes so you'd actually be getting worse performance if you used raid0.

[RejZoR]

You don't live your life to the fullest unless you run this thing in RAID0. You don't buy a Ferrari just to then drive it carefully at 40km/h everywhere. You don't buy this Sabrent monstrosity to run it in RAID1 or RAID5. Just fact.

[FloRolf]

Love the fact it needs additional pcie 6pin power lmao. 

[mariushm]

23 minutes ago, FloRolf said:

Love the fact it needs additional pcie 6pin power lmao. 

Well a single m.2 connector gives up to around 12-15w on 3.3v  - a pci-e 4.0 ssd easily hits 10w when writing big amount of data.

8 m.2 connectors x 10w = 80w  ... assuming 95% efficiency converting 12v to 3.3v ... let's say 85w.

Then add 5w for the controller chip and you're at 90w

 

The pci-e slot can do 10w on 3.3v and 65w on 12v, so of course extra power is needed.. if you fill the card with 8 drives

[porina]

On 7/16/2021 at 11:26 AM, mariushm said:

yeah, what they don't point out is that they could have achieved those numbers with just 4 SSDs 

They probably went with 8 to saturate PCIe. 4 wouldn't have, especially not in writes. Maybe even 6 wouldn't be enough. Also, capacity.

 

On 7/16/2021 at 5:29 PM, jasonvp said:

It's puzzled me why none of the other NVMe makers (namely the champ: Sammy) have bothered trying to make drives with the same capacities as Sabrent has.  I have no first hand experience with their hardware, but that seems a bit suss to me.

Having bought a 2TB 980 Pro recently, I'm not exactly looking forward to the pricing a 4TB model would cost (likely over 2x due to density premium). In a quick look Samsung only do 4TB SATA SSDs? Do they have dense enough flash to do 4TB on M.2? Wonder who's flash Sabrent uses.

 

5 hours ago, SGT-AMD said:

Wanted CC info as well! No WAY

I think that's only expected if they do an advance replacement. That is, send you a replacement before they receive yours back. Makes it faster, but they don't want to get scammed out of a SSD if it never gets returned.

 

 

Overall I think it could be an interesting plaything for use cases where you simply can't put enough physical ram in a single system. The use of a raid 0 controller is a downer though, as software advanced enough to use storage as ram substitute can better manage it than a raid controller or Windows can. Certainly sucks for random reads though, even if it is reasonable for a flash SSD. My Optane 900p is over 3x faster than this on a badly optimised system.

[DildorTheDecent]

29 minutes ago, porina said:

Wonder who's flash Sabrent uses.

Micron (96 layer TLC). https://www.legitreviews.com/sabrent-rocket-4-plus-4tb-nvme-ssd-review_227766

 

Endurance is worse compared to the E16 drives that used Toshiba flash I think.

[jasonvp]

2 hours ago, porina said:

Having bought a 2TB 980 Pro recently, I'm not exactly looking forward to the pricing a 4TB model would cost (likely over 2x due to density premium). In a quick look Samsung only do 4TB SATA SSDs? Do they have dense enough flash to do 4TB on M.2?

The cost issue, if Samsung made it, wouldn't really concern me.  I'd have far more faith in the product they delivered.  But the simple fact is, like you found out: Samsung doesn't have a product like that.  As far as I know, 2TB NVMe is as dense as they go.  Thus why I call the Sabrent modules "suss".

 

SSDs are another story, of course.

 

[Shimejii]

This is HORRIBLE, I would never use this drive in something i actually needed. For having 32 TB, it makes 0 sense. 9 points of failure is not something id want to risk for this kind of price.

 

Would make a great scrubbing drive or if you had a workload but geez the risk of just one drive failing oooof

[RejZoR]

On 7/18/2021 at 7:18 AM, Shimejii said:

This is HORRIBLE, I would never use this drive in something i actually needed. For having 32 TB, it makes 0 sense. 9 points of failure is not something id want to risk for this kind of price.

 

Would make a great scrubbing drive or if you had a workload but geez the risk of just one drive failing oooof

The number of failure points is actually no different than with any SSD drive. Those have multiple chips and if only one fails, you generally lose it all too.

[leadeater]

On 7/17/2021 at 4:29 AM, jasonvp said:

It's puzzled me why none of the other NVMe makers (namely the champ: Sammy) have bothered trying to make drives with the same capacities as Sabrent has.  I have no first hand experience with their hardware, but that seems a bit suss to me.

Samsung does have them in these large capacities just different form factors. Even with the closest, PM1725b, I'd be very willing to bet that this would have better sustained IOPs and latencies and also be way less likely to fail.

 

Nothing prevents using a good software RAID solution or a Broadcom/LSI Tri-Mode NVMe RAID card and you'll smash Sabrent's numbers.

 

As with @Lurick experience, bottom dollar products get bottom dollar support.

[leadeater]

47 minutes ago, RejZoR said:

The number of failure points is actually no different than with any SSD drive. Those have multiple chips and if only one fails, you generally lose it all too.

It's a little different, you have 8 SSD controllers (or however many M.2's you use) so if just one fails then array data is dead.

[leadeater]

On 7/18/2021 at 11:11 AM, jasonvp said:

The cost issue, if Samsung made it, wouldn't really concern me.  I'd have far more faith in the product they delivered.  But the simple fact is, like you found out: Samsung doesn't have a product like that.  As far as I know, 2TB NVMe is as dense as they go.  Thus why I call the Sabrent modules "suss".

 

SSDs are another story, of course.

 

Largest NVMe Samsung makes is 15.36TB but it's over on the Enterprise product lines, around $3.5k. You can get a 30.72TB but only in 2.5" SAS.