What just happened? Thanks to AMD's X570 platform, excitement around the PCIe 4.0 standard is growing among consumers. We've already heard about the speedy SSD drives the spec can enable, and now Sabrent has become one of the first companies to put one up for sale.
The US firm's Rocket Nvme PCIe 4.0 SSD is now available to purchase from Amazon, with shipping listed at two to three days. It conforms to the M.2 2280 form factor and NVMe 1.3 standard.
Based on Toshiba's BiCS4 96L TLC (triple-level cell) NAND Flash memory, the drive can reach up to 5,000 MB/s sequential read and 4,400 MB/s sequential write speeds when fitted into a PCIe 4.0 x 4 slot. It's backward compatible with PCIe 3.0, where it offers sequential read and write speeds of up to 3,500 MB/s and 3,400 MB/s, respectively.
The drive uses Phison's PS5016-E16 SSD controller and includes power management support for APST/ASPM/L1. It also boasts support for SMART and TRIM commands, along with advanced wear leveling, bad block management, error correction code, and over-provision.
There are two storage choices available for the drive: a 1TB option that costs $229.99, and a 2TB size priced at $429.99.
Back at Computex, Gigabyte showed off its Aorus AIC Gen4 SSD, which features 8TB of storage and can reach 15 GB/s when running in a RAID 0 configuration.
Despite PCIe 4.0 only just arriving, both the PCIe 5.0 (128 GB/s) and PCIe 6.0 (256 GB/s) specs have been announced during the last few weeks.