Sabrent has begun teasing the Rocket 2230, a new NVMe PCIe 4.0 M.2 2230 SSD that targets owners of Valve’s handheld gaming computer, the Steam Deck, which launched in February 2022 to critical acclaim.
Promotional materials that were initially shared by Enos Tech can confirm the look of the Rocket 2230 and its sequential read and write speeds, which can reach up to 4,750 MB/s and 4,300 MB/s, respectively, according to a marketing sheet that demonstrates how the storage compares to older standards.
The Sabrent Rocket 2230 blends new technology with a small form factor to provide something special for your devices. Whether you own a Steam Deck, a Microsoft Surface, an ultrabook, NUC, or even a compact HTPC. pic.twitter.com/M7kC198Qbh
— Sabrent America (@Sabrent) December 10, 2022
“Don’t let the small size fool you: the Rocket 2230 is one very fast drive,” Sabrent wrote. “It offers Gen4 NVMe performance in a tiny form factor. Hit up to 5GBps and push up to 800K IOPS with slick responsiveness. It’s also backward compatible with Gen3 and Gen2 PCIe slots with reduced bandwidth but retains excellent latency.”
Steam Deck stock SSD vs. Rocket 2230 speed tests, as performed by Sabrent:
Sabrent has also confirmed that the Rocket 2230 will be available in three capacities:
“Many 2230 drives are limited in capacity, making life more difficult, especially when building an extensive game collection,” explained Sabrent. “Many devices come with limited internal storage space, forcing you to pay a premium or rely on microSD cards. Now you can store everything you want on one drive as the Rocket 2230 comes in capacities of up to 1TB.”
The Rocket 2230 doesn’t appear to be listed anywhere on Sabrent’s site yet, but the company says that it will arrive in its warehouse very soon.
Sabrent currently offers an extensive range of items beyond storage, including hubs, chargers, cables, and more.
Discussion (1 reply)
Join Discussion →Ok that's great, but I have thoughts.
First - you are constrained by that form factor on the Deck. So great that they are targeting it.
But -- speed is the absolute bottom priority anyone should have for their Deck, especially given that there isn't really all that much of a performance hit even running from the SD card slot.
The first priority - capacity. It's hard to get any large capacity in that form factor. The second would be energy use -- the Deck is horrible on battery life, and sure, it's great that you throw a fast SSD in there, but if it shaves 15min off your battery life, that's ... counter productive. The Deck has horrible battery life and energy management in the first place, no need to help it shoot itself in the foot. A third would be noise - some people have a noisy internal fan, mine is fortunately quite reasonable, but if your packing in a fast SSD inside that chassis that's adding more heat, that's a problem too.
So, very nice this is coming up to 1TB in size - which is great. But if it's shaving minutes off my play time and/or causes the fan to crank like mad, that's horrible.
If I'm crowing about all of this - and it happens to have this density, and that speed, and it's in the same (or better) power envelope -- well, then... take my money.