Sabrent looks to break records with their PCIe Gen5 NVMe drives

Sabrent has been our go-to for high-end drives that strike a solid balance of performance and price. As we start to get traction on the first PCIe Gen5 drives, Sabrent has been hard at work in their lab. While early drives we’ve seen have come in at around 10,000 MB/s, they are squeezing their drives even harder. How hard? Well, if their most recent lab results are any indication, how does an extra 2.3 gigs GB/s sound? The theoretical limit of PCIe Gen5 is 14,000 MB/s, a number that Sabrent has repeatedly said they will work diligently to hit, and these they aren’t that far from it.

Phison, the controller manufacturer, has been a steadfast partner, tightening timings and how fast the states of change can be hit. The lab results are currently just over 12,000 MB/s for sequential read, and nearly 12,000 MB/s sequential write. Their new X5 is still in the tuning process, but it doesn’t take much to see how this will turn out. Looking at our review of the Rocket 4 Plus, we found 6,933 MB/s sequential read, and 6861 MB/s sequential write speeds — very close to the theoretical limits of the hardware, and easily half a gig faster than nearly any other drive we tested last generation. Better still, we saw extraordinarly consistent speeds in real-world applications like streaming and moving mixed-sized files.

It’d have been easy to see Sabrent ship a cheaper version and then a “new and improved” version, but they are opting to capture the top tier of the market instead. I don’t know who in the leadership at Sabrent decided to pay attention to the gaming community, but with what we see on the X5, the Steam Deck Dock, and the 2230 NVMe upgrade for the Steamdeck, it’s clear that we are on their mind.

Stay tuned here at GamingTrend.com for when we finally get our hands on one of these lab units. I have a feeling it’s gonna blow our hair back.