when sabrin announced their rocket
extreme q ssd drives
we instantly pre-ordered one and then a
couple of weeks later
they reached out to us and offered to
send us a couple of these drives
which we obviously accepted so here we
have the two terabyte and four terabyte
models that we've been testing
and so far we've been extremely
impressed because they support very fast
thunderbolt 3 speeds
just as you'd expect from an ssd that's
built into one of apple's modern macs
or a high-end windows machine but
compared to apple's ssds
the severance are better first of all
because
of the price here's a side-by-side chart
showing how much money you save with a
sovereign drive
compared to apple storage upgrade prices
on the 2025k
imac that's a savings of 800. for an 8
terabyte drive
and on top of that it's nearly
impossible to take an apple ssd
off of a mac thanks to them either being
soldered on
or controlled by the t2 chip so if you
get one of these excellent separate
drives
you can take it with you when you
eventually upgrade to an apple silicon
mac
later on in the future and to make it
even better
these severant drives support both on
about 3 and usbc
ports compared to a lot of other
thunderbolt 3 drives
like this one that we custom built which
only works with thunderbolt 3
whereas the severant drives are actually
going to work with basically any modern
computer
like a windows laptop or even an ipad
pro
at a very impressive rated speed of 900
megabytes per second
so the sovereign extreme q drives are
really the optimal choice for
convenience going into the future
especially since it's one of the few
drives available right now
that you can actually get with up to a
massive eight
terabytes of storage now with all of
that said let me finally get into
reviewing the drive
itself starting with the design and
portability the build quality is really
nice with an aluminum finish
all around the ssd and the design is
very subtle and clean
with nothing but two logos on the top
one for sabrin's
and one for thunderbolt on the underside
there are two rubber strips that stop
the aluminum ssd from going all over
your desk
like other drives like this custom one
does and they also help keep the finish
looking great
and the included 3 foot thunderbolt 3
cable matches up to the dark gray
aluminum exterior
very well and for being able to support
up to a massive 8 terabytes of storage
this ssd is incredibly compact while
also having a nice and solid amount of
weight to it this is probably due to the
thermal pad that's included
inside the enclosure for heat
dissipation and because of the slim and
compact design
you can easily slide this into your
pocket or throw it into your laptop bag
to make for the most portable
high-capacity ssd out there now let's
finally get into the technical side of
this storage drive
plugging it in for the first time it
worked exactly as i expected
a blank drive with four terabytes of
capacity
ready to use at any time no driver
installation or reformatting required
and getting into the performance of this
drive we ended up running the same
transfer stress test that we ran
for one of our videos where we compared
the most popular
portable thunderbolt 3 ssds in 2020
running the blackmagic disk speed test
the other one terabyte drives were
faster than this one in terms of read
speed
and the story was actually the same for
the write speed being slower than those
drives
but wait don't judge a drive by its
benchmarks
because this one is actually faster than
the others for large transfers as you'll
see
in just a second the reason for that is
something called slc cache
which basically means that it can write
a certain amount of data really
fast before it slows down and they do
this to make the drives more cost
effective
so looking at the other drives you only
get those high transfer speeds
for a limited amount of data transferred
like only 20 gigs on the g
drive and about 48 gigabytes on the
samsung x5 ssd
so basically if you're transferring a
file from your computer
to the drive that's larger than the
amount of slc cache
then the transfer speed actually slows
down like in the case of the owc drive
slowing all the way down to a minimum
speed of 950 megabytes per second write
speed
after 30 gigs is transferred so we ended
up transferring a large 172 gigabyte
file to each drive
and the differences in slc cache and
minimum speed
caused a huge difference in the amount
of time for the transfer to finish
now this is where saturn's extreme q
drive comes in
both of them even the two terabyte model
finished the test in only one minute and
27 seconds
beating out all of the other drives in
real world transfer speed
even though it was slower in terms of
the write speed
benchmark that's because there was no
slc cache limit for these drives in that
test
running at full speed for the entire 172
gig file transfer
so we ended up transferring a much
larger 403 gig
file and we were surprised to see that
it transferred the entire 403 gigabytes
without hitting an soc cash limit and we
saw the same results
for the 2 terabyte model and as soon as
that transfer finished
i transferred it again and for only
around 20 seconds
the write speed went down to around 1400
to 1500 megabytes per second
before going back up to the full speed
for the rest of the transfer
so that's super impressive and to make
these seven drives even better
they support both thunderbolt 3 and usbc
at the same time and out of those four
drives that we tested
only the c drive came with that same
support
so we transfer that 403 gig file on the
lassie drive and it took
almost twice as long as the seventh
drive because of its soc cache limit
slowing down the write speeds so based
on all of those tests that we ran
these separate drives are actually
faster than those four
drives in terms of real world transfer
speeds
and the cherry on top is that they're
much less
expensive as well the one terabyte model
is only 220 dollars
compared to a huge four hundred and two
dollars
for the la c drive and it's even less
expensive than the owc drive
which we had many issues with and even
though its slc
cash is lower than our two terabyte and
four terabyte models
it still smokes the more expensive
drives
and then moving up to a two terabyte
model the severant is only 360 dollars
compared to 702 for the lessee
and interestingly the two terabyte
sabrand is actually closer to the price
of the one terabyte versions
of the other drives so we would
recommend the two terabyte model
since we didn't hit an soc cache limit
even after 400 gigabytes
and out of all of those drives the
sabrand is much more portable and
compact and it's the only one available
with a massive eight terabytes of
storage for
sixteen hundred dollars which may sound
expensive
but it's eight hundred dollars less than
apple charges
for an eight terabyte ssd that you can't
remove
and you can't take with you so with all
that said let's finish off our testing
with how this
cyber drive compares to the custom ssd
that we built
well that custom drive was actually 23
seconds faster
in our 172 gigabyte transfer test and
that's because the write speeds
were faster than on the sovereign drive
however
there are a few major drawbacks with our
custom-built ssd
that outweigh the faster speeds the main
one is the price
for both the enclosure and the ones here
by ssd
you're looking at 330 dollars for the
custom drive
compared to only 220 for the sovereign
drive
and of course it's already pre-assembled
so you don't have to open it up and
install the drive yourself
but the biggest drawback is the fact
that the custom drive
only supports thunderbolt 3 while the
sabrant
also supports usbc so we were able to
hook it up to our ipad pro and easily
transfer some files
and that level of convenience is why we
recommend it
over the custom ssd so with all of that
said
we can safely say that the new sabrint
extreme q external ssds
are by far the best bang for the bug
drives we've
ever used easily outclassing the most
popular
thunderbolt 3 ssds and even being a
better choice
than our custom built drive and if
you're interested in buying one of these
drives for your mac
your pc or even your ipad then you can
find the links to the various storage
sizes of these new cyber drives
down in the description below and if you
want to see more reviews like this one
go ahead and click the circle above to
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watching and we'll see you
in the next video
you