according to Recent Sabrent Newsletter (opens in new tab), the company is developing a new “Rocket X5” PCIe Gen 5 SSD that could reach speeds of 14 GBps. is determined to achieve if possible. If the X5 can hit its lofty goals, it will surpass all the best SSDs on the market right now.
The Rocket X5 is currently in development, and according to Sabrent, the name and label may change before release, as well as transfer speeds. In effect, Sabrent is trying to get as high a performance as his current SSD technology allows, without other factors getting in the way.
Today, the prototype version of Rocket X5 has already reached read speeds of over 12 GBps, surpassing the speeds offered by the first PCIe Gen 5 SSDs on the market. So, at least for now, Sabrent seems to be on track to meet his 14 GBps goal.
Currently, all PCIe Gen 5 SSD manufacturers are shipping products with transfer rates of 10 GBps or 12 GBps. For those of you who don’t know, 14 GBps to 15 GBps is the specification limit for PCIe Gen 5 x4, and this transfer rate is what motivates manufacturers so much.
This issue is related to the production issues surrounding the faster 2400MTps 3D NAND flash, required to achieve these high transfer speeds. Currently, none of the three 3D NAND makers producing 2400MTps chips, including Micron, SK Hynix and YMTC, have been able to bring these chips to market in large quantities.
Technically, Micron doesn’t have this problem. While significantly ahead of SK Hynix and his YMTC in both maturity and volume production, the company has been dealing with chip yield shortages that have been a production bottleneck. According to Tom’s Hardware sources, these issues should have been resolved at the time of this writing, but this has not been confirmed. For more information, see our previous article here.
As a result, there seems to be no guarantee that the Rocket X5 will hit 14 GBps every time it boots. The final characteristics of the drive will depend on Sabrent’s production strategy and whether to wait for fast 2400MTps NAND Flash or skip it entirely and boot the drive with slower specs.
