Sabrent Rocket UHS-II SDXC V90 Memory Cards Reviewed

TweakTown's Rating: 91%

The Bottom Line

Expanding its reach to memory cards, Sabrent provides some firsts for the industry with its 512GB V90 solution alongside top notch performance from its entire range of UHS-II products.

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Sabrent has been in the news quite often as of late, expanding their product lineup to include SO-DIMM memory solutions alongside the announcement of a line of high capacity UHS-II memory card solutions that we expect will hit the market soon. For the latter, we now have our hands-on samples of every capacity for this new portfolio of SDXC cards, and after a fresh format will run these through some testing.

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We first need to talk about specifications, and at the top of the list is capacity. Sabrent is offering these solutions from 64GB to 512GB. Each of these solutions are UHS-II capable with speed ratings of 280 MB/s read and 250 MB/s write. They are also Speed Class 10 and UHS Speed Class 3 rated alongside a V90 rating. Borrowing the image above from the SD Association, you can get an idea of what these classes mean for consumers.

As for pricing, consumers will be looking at $69.99 for the 64GB model, $119 for the 128GB, and $349 for the 256GB. The 512GB solution comes in at $799, which while expensive, makes it the lowest cost option at this capacity with the V90 and UHS-II ratings.

Sabrent Rocket SDXC UHS-II Cards

The form factor is, as expected, SDXC, with a lock slot on the left side in yellow. We have Sabrent branding across the top of each card and each of the ratings embossed below. At the very bottom, you will find the capacity for each card.

Memory Card Testing

I used two methods for testing the Rocket SDXC memory cards. The first, as you can see above, is CDM. CDM is one of the quickest and most widely used methods for testing storage. For the 64GB capacity, this gave us 224 MB/s read and 260 MB/ write.

The second test method was using real data with RealBench, transferring an ISO file to the card. In this scenario, the 64GB model handled the data at 196 MB/s.

Moving to the 128GB capacity, we have 225 MB/s read and 261 MB/s write in CDM. DiskBench pulled in 194 MB/s.

Next up, we had the 256GB capacity run through testing. We came away with 216 MB/s read and 233 MB/s write in CDM. Our DiskBench copy scenario came away at 187 MB/s.

Last, we have the 512GB model up for testing. CDM showed 219 MB/s read and 243 MB/s write. In our copy scenario with DiskBench, this card produced the best results yet at 215 MB/s.

Charting these drives so we can digest all of the data, we see the two lower capacity drives offer higher write performance while all drives maintain steady read performance around 220 MB/s. Small file performance or random throughput offers identical write performance across capacities and varying read performance, with lower capacity drives getting higher IOPS.

Final Thoughts

Sabrent has certainly been active in the market over the last few months, adding to their extensive portfolio, and with Gen5 NVMe solution ready to land at any time, it will only get busier.

As for these Rocket SDXC memory cards, it's new territory for Sabrent, but they're coming in hot, with solid performance that rivals any of the big guns like Lexar or SanDisk.

In our testing, the Sabrent cards all performed flawlessly both in CDM and DiskBench with our real-world data sample. As our testing showed, we were able to hit or come very close to marketing performance with all capacities.

As for pricing, Sabrent is certainly competitive with the 64GB and 128GB models, both coming in cheaper than the SanDisk or Lexar solutions. 256GB, Sabrent comes in a little hot, $50 more expensive than Lexar, while SanDisk doesn't have any competing product at this capacity. 512GB V90 solutions are extremely rare these days, with Sabrent and Wise the only two currently on the books with product. That said, Sabrent does, at this point, appear to be coming in $100 more expensive than the Wise solution, which is retailing for $699 on B&H.

4/25/22 Update: Sabrent reached out to let us know pricing for their Rocket SDXC cards has been adjusted. While previously $799, the 512GB V90 card has dropped to $599.99 and the 256GB card down to $249.99. Both the 64GB and 128GB options have maintained their $69.99 and $119.99 pricing.

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