- When Apple released
the 60-inch MacBook Pro, there was something about this machine that was unprecedented, the fact that it could
be equipped with up to eight terabytes of
high-speed NVMe storage. There was nothing like
that available for the PC, that is, until now. This right here is the Sabrent eight-terabyte M.2 NVMe drive, available for you to
upgrade your laptop with. And I'm about to use it to make this Asus G14 very, very happy. GlassWire's the tool
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code Linus, down below. (upbeat music) We'll start by taking a
closer look at the SSD itself, but unfortunately, not this one, because it's got its stickers, which actually act as a
heat spreader, pre-applied. Instead, Sabrent actually sent over one that's got the stickers separate here. You can actually see
the thin line of copper along the edge of it. That (blows raspberry)
is a lotta NAND flash loaded onto an M.2. That is kinda incredible, actually. Here, I wanna peel off
this sticker as well. That is one void warranty,
ladies and gentlemen. What we're looking at here
is a Phison E12S controller with support for up to eight channels. Even though it's PCI express Gen 3, I would still expect pretty
solid performance outta this. But what's really notable here is the fact that in order to fit all of these NAND packages onto this M.2, they actually had to
shrink the package size of the controller
itself, so they could fit not just the NAND flash
but also the controller. And not one but, there you go, two eight-gigabit DDR3 memory dies. So the reason that you need
this memory is in order to store the actual physical
locations of the data on the NAND flash for
the controller itself. And the more flash you have,
the more DRAM you need. So that's a total of two
gigs of RAM on this SSD. That's right, my friends, this SSD has more memory on it
than a lotta Chromebooks. A ton of DRAM and flash chips isn't enough to get to eight terabytes
of capacity, though. They're using 96-layer
QLC flash from Micron, and QLC has a benefit. That is that you can
store four bits per cell, rather than three bits per cell in TLC or two bits per cell in MLC. The downside of that,
sorry, excuse me one moment. I just have to un-void my
warranty here real quick. Not actually how that works. The downside of that
is that the endurance, and especially write
performance, of QLC flash is not as good compared
to NAND that stores fewer bits per cell. However, Sabrent actually
has a trick up their sleeves, and I'm gonna tell you about it, actually, while I'm opening up the laptop here. It's kind of amazing
how heavy this thing is, even without the copper sticker, just having twice as
many NAND packages on it. It's crazy, it's almost like the storage has weight to it. SLC caching is a
performance-boosting trick that SSD manufacturers have
been using for quite some time. And what it does is it can
take up to, in this case, a quarter of the device's capacity, so that's two terabytes,
and run it in SLC mode. So that would be
effectively about 512 gigs, meaning that it will
write at a very high rate temporarily until you use up that cache, and then it will rely on some idle time in order to convert it over to QLC, where it will be stored more efficiently, but at lower performance. Now, on lower-capacity
drives, this type of caching can manifest as very
inconsistent performance. For example, if you were copying a file off of, say, a Red Mag onto your laptop, it'll copy at a super high
speed for the first little bit, and then absolutely tank because you get not only the penalty
of dropping down to TLC or QLC write performance,
but the poor drive is struggling to do garbage
collection in the background. Thing is, with such a high-capacity drive, the likelihood of needing to copy more than 512 gigs of data in
one shot is relatively low, so it's a strategy that
makes a ton of sense. With that said, I suspect
the 550k IOPS random reads and 660k IOPS random writes
that the drive is rated for are while it's operating
under ideal conditions. And none of that does anything about one of QLC's biggest pitfalls,
and that is its endurance. So you can expect somewhere
in the neighborhood of around 1,800 terabytes
written with this thing as an expected lifespan. Holy bananas. In many cases, M.2 mounts, for which there's no real
standard of thickness, as Mark Cerny actually pointed out in the PlayStation 5
architectural discussion, for M.2, so you might run into slots where they're not actually designed for an M.2 that's got chips on both sides. Now, this drive looks
like we're gonna get away with kinda chonkin' it on there like that, and it actually seems
like this thermal pad is well-positioned to take care of cooling our controller down here, so that's good. Gotta remember which
side the controller's on. Nope, not this one, nevermind,
that's kind of a bummer. But hopefully, Sabrent's customizations that they say they made
to the Phison controller to keep CPU power under control are gonna keep it cool enough. Apparently, with all
these NAND chips on here, this thing can get pretty toasty. Ooh, it's flexin', boys, I don't like it. This is a lot of freakin' laptop in a very, very small space. We got Ryzen 9, we got
eight terabytes of storage, 2060 with Max-Q. First things first, your
classic CrystalDiskMark. Look at that, that is nuts! Even just seeing that, 6.98 terabytes. That's your Windows
install, little tiny sliver. Right out of the gate,
we're seeing exactly what I was talking about here. These are some nice PCI
Express Gen 3x4 numbers right here for our reads. And look at that, there's
no apparent QLC penalty for writes because it's
using that SLC cache, and this benchmark is only
about one gig of data. If you think about your daily life, how often are you writing
more than a few gigs, or at worst, maybe 100 gigs of data on a large game install, at one time? In ATTO, some of the
weaknesses of the drive get revealed though. So while our stock drive was definitely gonna be bottlenecked when it comes to just raw sequential throughput,
thanks to its PCIe Gen 3 2X, rather than 4X interface,
this one right here, the eight-terabyte drive, ends
up struggling a little bit when it comes to very,
very small transfers. And that can be very meaningful
to real world performance, because a lot of the things that you do as you're just navigating
around your operating system involve moving very small amounts of data. Driving this point home is the
PCMark 10 storage benchmark, where our Rocket Q falls about 25% behind in terms of access latency
compared to our Intel 660p, which, bear in mind,
guys, is also a QLC drive, just a one-terabyte one, rather than one that's loaded up with all these chips that supposedly had to compromise
on the power consumption of the controller in order to keep its thermals under control. So is the performance of
the Rocket Q eight-terabyte groundbreaking by any
stretch of the imagination? No, but is it a solid enough looking drive that has eight freaking
terabytes of storage on it, and that is very unlikely
to exhaust its SLC cache while you are transferring files to it? Yes, in fact, I wanna test that right now. Here we go. Now, this might feel like
a bit of an edge case, but I've actually run into it before, where I was using a laptop
that I didn't realize was actually a TLC SSD,
but it had a TLC SSD, and I was just trying to copy over a bunch of Steam game files. And it was going, going, going, going, it was going great, everything was good, and then suddenly, bam! Fell down to like 60 megabytes a second. So let's see how long this can handle it. 'Cause the thing is, we've got
high enough speed interfaces just on your typical consumer laptop now. Just a simple USB Type-C
five gigabit per second or 10 gigabit per second port that you can actually take advantage
of having an NVMe SSD in your system, just by
plugging in an external drive. So here, we're going at
450 megabytes a second, and this transfer's gonna
take us half an hour. If we have a drive that conks out in the middle of that transfer, well, that can go from taking half
an hour to taking hours. Which, if you're on location
working on a project, for example, can be the
difference between wrapping up at the end of the day and not. We're at over 120 gigs transferred now, and it's still going exactly as fast as it was when we started. By contrast, if we were using
a one-terabyte QLC drive with 25% of its area set
aside for SLC caching, we would've seen a precipitous
drop in performance, probably about halfway through
what we've done so far here. 400 gigs now. I'm expecting it to crap
out a little bit before 512. It's not gonna be just a nice,
tidy line, I don't think. We're at 256 gigs remaining,
and I'm expecting it to crater at around 208. We'll see how gracefully
it handles that transition between writing to the cache and writing to the slower native QLC NAND. There were some compromises. So Sabrent's compatibility is
not perfect across laptops. Anthony actually tried a couple of Dells, and because of the higher power
consumption of this puppy, they were not able to run it. This Asus did it okay,
but your mileage may vary, so it's not just a physical limitation in terms of compatibility. We're gettin' close, we're gettin' close! We're at 220, drum roll! (fingers tapping) 216! My fingers are gettin' sore. This is supposed to absolutely
choke on its own self now. We're at 208 remaining. It's possible that the
speed of our Red Mag, which is actually just an
mSATA SSD in a fancy enclosure, we made a video about that,
you can check it out here, is not fast enough to overwhelm even the native QLC write speed. Well, you would need a
much, much faster medium that you're ingesting from
in order for the caching to even be problem for a
sustained write like this. Well, now we know. That kinda makes sense, given who the target audience is for these things. They're targeting
enthusiasts, content creators, those sorts of people, so I'm
glad it passed the test here. I was not really expecting it to. Now that I know that they actually managed that kind of performance,
I guess it makes sense. So if you guys are interested
in checking this out, as always, we're gonna have it linked in the video description. IFixit's Pro Tech Toolkit
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so visit ifixit.com/linus and pick up your Pro Tech Toolkit today. If you guys enjoyed this video, we've actually got a lot
more detail on QLC NAND in one of our previous videos covering Intel's first QLC drive,
which you can check out right over here or at the link down below.
That costs more than the computer itself
I didn't watch the video yet but I am assuming this is a dual-sided drive with flash chips on both sides of the PCB. Worth noting that the SSD in the G14 is single sided and the WiFi card sits directly underneath it. There's a real chance that a dual sided drive won't fit correctly.
Edit: watched the video... holy moly. Not sure I'd trust flexing a $1500 part like that.
That M.2 takes way more power to run apparently (which is why they went with the G14 vs other laptops, for compatible power draw) so I dunno if I'd go with a drive that large on a laptop this small. I'd want power usage numbers first.
I store my games on a portable ssd. Works great
That bending though... Ouch !