Hold onto your hats, because we’ve found a deal on face-meltingly fast storage. The 1TB PCIe 4.0 Sabrent Rocket NVMe M.2 SSD is on sale for just $144.48 at Amazon. That’s the all-time low and better than its most recent price of $170.
In addition to the 1TB model, the 2TB version is also on sale at $297.48—another all-time low, down from a $350 retail price. You can also get the 1TB SSD with a heatsink for $152.98 or the 2TB version with a heatsink for $314.48. Yes, those are also all-time low prices.
This M.2 “gumstick” SSD uses PCIe 4.0 instead of the usual PCIe 3.0 interface. That allows for super speedy transfer speeds. We haven’t reviewed this particular SSD—only the faster Rocket 4 Plus, which we loved—but Sabrent says the 1TB model has a read speed up to a whopping 5,000 megabytes per second and write speeds up to 3,000 megabytes per second.
To get those amazing speeds, you need a PCIe 4.0-compatible CPU and motherboard. At this writing that means AMD’s Ryzen only—specifically the Ryzen 3000 or Ryzen 5000 desktop processors and an X570 or B550 motherboard. Intel’s 11th-gen “Rocket Lake” desktop chips will add PCIe 4.0 support when they launch later this quarter, however.
If you don’t have a PCIe 4.0-compatible computer, then you can still pick this SSD up, but you’ll be locked to much slower PCIe 3.0 speeds until you upgrade the rest of your system. Spending up on this drive doesn’t make sense if you only plan to use it in PCIe 3.0. Check out our guide to the best SSDs if you need more storage but aren’t rocking a recent Ryzen rig.
[Today’s deal: 1TB Sabrent Rocket 4 for $144.48 on Amazon.]
This story, "Sabrent's blistering fast PCIe 4.0 Rocket SSD has never been cheaper" was originally published by PCWorld.