Sabrent Quad Drive NVMe RAID Card Review

Introduction

The storage requirements of the average user have swayed back and forth across the years. We're old enough to remember tapes, then floppy discs, 20MB hard drives and all the way up to the latest and greatest.

When SSDs first appeared on the market their speed was so transformative that we all gladly gave up the capacity we'd enjoyed with our HDDs to get that sweet 500MB/s transfer rate. Of course, like Moore's Law predicted, eventually we had massive SSDs that brought large capacities to go along with those high speeds, perfect for the new suite of enormous AAA gaming titles and their 100GB footprint.

Now we're all used to M.2 drives, which thankfully blend even higher speeds with decent capacities and, considering their transfer rates, prices which remain on the sane side of performance hardware. That is until you require a serious amount of storage though, when the cost escalates rapidly. With the rise of 4K video on our phones, and ever more people sharing their gaming and deep-dives in video form, more of us require meaty storage capacities to go along with the fast transfer rates that stop our drives being the limiting factor in our exploits.

The best solution to this issue is to have multiple drives in the capacity per GB sweet spot, but of course most motherboards only have a couple, or perhaps three, M.2 slots. With one taken up by our OS it doesn't leave a lot of wiggle room. Enter Sabrent with their Quad-Drive PCIe NVMe RAID card. Capable of supporting four drives, all the various RAID options, and hitting the market, unpopulated, at £99, it seems like the perfect option. Let's find out by populating it with 4 of their Rocket 4 Plus M.2 2TB drives and seeing what performance can be squeezed. First though, let's take a closer look.

Technical Specifications