Rocket 2230 SSD: Sabrent gets a lot from 3cm

The American manufacturer Sabrent has introduced a specially compact type NVMe SSD. The Rocket 2230 is available in a short 3cm M.2 format. However, it offers up to 1TB of storage and up to 5000MB/s via PCIe 4.0. This will make it a faster alternative to the SSD in the Steam Deck.

The M.2 form factor is 2230 units measuring 22mm wide by 30mm tall. The M.2 2280 format with a length of 80 mm is more popular in the PC segment. But in very small systems this can be really long.

Short enough for the Steam Deck

That’s what the Sabrent Rocket 2230 is for. The manufacturer chose to use the laptop’s Steam Deck as an ideal scenario. Unlike a factory-installed Kingston SSD, a Sabrent SSD is supposed to run faster, which the manufacturer demonstrates with a benchmark. However, many different SSDs are installed in the Steam Deck, so the feature doesn’t always have to be that great.

Peak performance of 5000MB/s reading and 4300MB/s should be faster in the given benchmarks. This is ensured by the Phison E21’s 4-channel controller on Micron’s 176-generation 3D-TLC-NAND. It’s interesting looking at Sabrent’s datasheet that the largest version with 1TB of storage isn’t always faster than the 512GB version. As expected, the smallest model with 256GB achieves the lowest rates of 4650MB/s read and 1900MB/s write.

In the small M.2 2230 SSD category, Sabrent should now claim the performance crown. Kioxia’s BG5 also uses PCIe 4.0, but only achieves a maximum of 3,500MB/s.

Populated on one side, without DRAM

The specified height of 2.15 mm as well as a pictogram indicate that the 2230 rocket is filled with components on one side. Space for a DRAM chip is not required because the controller operates without its own DRAM cache (less DRAM) and instead accesses a small portion (usually 16 to 64 MB) of system RAM via the return of the NVMe Host Memory Buffer function .

As usual, the SLC cache, where part of the TLC-NAND is initially written using only 1 bit instead of 3 bits per cell, ensures higher write rates.

Sabrent has not announced pricing or availability. Manufacturer’s SSDs are usually also available in that country.