The US manufacturer Sabrent has presented a particularly compact NVMe SSD. The Rocket 2230 is available in the 3 cm short M.2 format. Nevertheless, it offers up to 1 TB of storage volume and up to 5,000 MB/s via PCIe 4.0. This would make it a faster alternative to the SSD in the Steam Deck.
The M.2 2230 form factor stands for a 22 mm wide and 30 mm long module. The M.2 2280 format with a length of 80 mm is more common in the PC sector. But in very compact systems this can already be too long.
Short enough for the Steam Deck
That's what the Sabrent Rocket 2230 is for. The manufacturer has selected use in the handheld PC Steam Deck as the ideal scenario. In contrast to the factory-installed Kingston SSD, the Sabrent SSD is supposed to work much faster, which the manufacturer demonstrates with a benchmark comparison. However, various different SSDs are installed in the Steam Deck, so the advantage does not always have to be that great.
Kingston OM3PDP3512B-A01 from the Steam Deck (Image: Enos Tech)
Sabrent Rocket 2230 1TB (Image: Enos Tech)The peak performance of 5,000 MB/s reading and 4,300 MB/s writing should be even faster in selected benchmarks. This is ensured by the 4-channel controller Phison E21 in connection with Micron's 3D-TLC-NAND of the 176-layer generation. It is interesting when looking at the Sabrent data sheet that the largest version with 1 TB storage volume is not always faster than the version with 512 GB. As expected, the smallest model with 256 GB achieves the lowest values of 4,650 MB/s reading and 1,900 MB/s writing.
Sabrent Rocket 2230 Specifications (Image: Enos Tech)In the category of tiny M.2 2230 SSDs, Sabrent should now claim the performance crown for itself. Kioxia's BG5 also uses PCIe 4.0, but only achieves a maximum of 3,500 MB/s.
Equipped on one side, without DRAM
The specified height of 2.15 mm and an illustration indicate indicates that the Rocket 2230 is unilaterally populated with components. Space for a DRAM chip is not required because the controller works without its own DRAM cache (DRAM-less) and instead accesses a tiny part (usually 16 to 64 MB) of the system RAM via the NVMe function Host Memory Buffer back.
Sabrent Rocket 2230 SSD (Picture: Storagereview)As usual, the SLC cache takes care of this, in which part of the TLC-NAND is initially written with only 1 bit instead of 3 bits per cell , for higher write rates.
Sabrent has not yet announced prices and availability. The manufacturer's SSDs are usually also available in this country.