 When Apple released the 16-inch MacBook Pro, there was something about this machine that was unprecedented. The fact that it could be equipped with up to 8 terabytes of high-speed NVMe storage. There was nothing like that available for the PC. That is, until now. This right here is the Sabrent 8 terabyte M.2 NVMe drive available for you to upgrade your laptop with, and I'm about to use it to make this Asus G14 very, very happy. GlassWire is the tool that shows you which apps are slowing down your connection in real time. It's used by security pros to monitor for malware, block bandwidth wasters, and detect suspicious activity. Get 25% off with offer code LINUS down below. We'll start by taking a closer look at the SSD itself, but unfortunately not this one, because it's got its stickers, which actually act as a heat spreader pre-applied. Instead, Sabrent actually sent over one that's got the stickers separate here. You can actually see the thin line of copper along the edge of it. That is a lot of NAND flash loaded onto an M.2. That is kind of incredible, actually. Here, I want to peel off the sticker as well. That is one void warranty, ladies and gentlemen. What we're looking at here is a Fizen E12S controller with support for up to 8 channels. Even though it's PCI Express Gen 3, I would still expect pretty solid performance out of this. But what's really notable here is the fact that in order to fit all of these NAND packages onto this M.2, they actually had to shrink the package size of the controller itself, so they could fit not just the NAND flash, but also the controller, and not one, but two 8-gigabit DDR3 memory dies. So the reason that you need this memory is in order to store the actual physical locations of the data on the NAND flash for the controller itself. And the more flash you have, the more DRAM you need. So that's a total of 2 gigs of RAM on this SSD. That's right, my friends, this SSD has more memory on it than a lot of Chromebooks. A ton of DRAM and flash chips isn't enough to get to 8 terabytes of capacity, though. They're using 96-layer QLC flash from Micron, and QLC has a benefit. That is that you can store 4 bits per cell rather than 3 bits per cell in TLC or 2 bits per cell in MLC. The downside of that... Sorry, excuse me one moment, I just have to unvoid my warranty here real quick. Not actually how that works. The downside of that is that the endurance and especially write performance of QLC flash is not as good compared to NAND that stores fewer bits per cell. However, Sabren actually has a trick up their sleeves, and I'm gonna tell you about it actually while I'm opening up the laptop here. It's kind of amazing how heavy this thing is, even without the copper sticker, just having twice as many NAND packages on it. It's crazy, it's almost like the storage has weight to it. SLC caching is a performance boosting trick that SSD manufacturers have been using for quite some time, and what it does is it can take up to, in this case, a quarter of the device's capacity, so that's 2 terabytes, and run it in SLC mode, so that would be effectively about 512 gigs, meaning that it will write at a very high rate temporarily until you use up that cache, and then it will rely on some idle time in order to convert it over to QLC, where it will be stored more efficiently, but at lower performance. Now on lower capacity drives, this type of caching can manifest as very inconsistent performance. For example, if you were copying a file off of, say, a red meg onto your laptop, it'll copy at a super high speed for the first little bit, and then absolutely tank because you get not only the penalty of dropping down to TLC or QLC write performance, but the poor drive is struggling to do garbage collection in the background. Thing is, with such a high capacity drive, the likelihood of needing to copy more than, like, 512 gigs of data in one shot is relatively low, so it's a strategy that makes a ton of sense. With that said, I suspect the 550K IOPS random reads and 660K IOPS random writes that the drive is rated for are while it's operating under ideal conditions, and none of that does anything about one of QLC's biggest pitfalls, and that is its endurance. So you can expect somewhere in the neighborhood of around 1800 terabytes written with this thing as an expected lifespan, holy bananas. In many cases, M.2 mounts for which there's no real standard of thickness, as Mark Cerny actually pointed out in the PlayStation 5 architectural discussion for M.2, so you might run into slots where they're not actually designed for an M.2 that's got chips on both sides. Now, this drive looks like we're gonna get away with kinda chonking it on there like that, and it actually seems like this thermal pad is well positioned to take care of cooling our controller down here, so that's good. Trying to remember which side the controller's on. Nope, not this one. So that's, never mind, that's kind of a bummer, but, well, hopefully, Saberence customizations that they say they made to the Phyzen controller to keep CPU power under control are gonna keep it cool enough. Apparently, with all these NAND chips on here, this thing can get pretty toasty. Ooh, it's flexin', boys, I don't like it. This is a lot of freakin' laptop in a very, very small space. We got Ryzen 9, we got 8 terabytes of storage, 2060 with Max-Q. First things first, your classic Crystal Disk Mark. Look at that. That is nuts. Even just seeing that, 6.98 terabytes, that's your Windows install. Little tiny sliver. Right out of the gate, we're seeing exactly what I was talking about here. These are some nice PCI Express Gen 3x4 numbers right here for our reads, and look at that. There's no apparent QLC penalty for writes because it's using that SLC cache, and this benchmark is only about 1 gig of data. If you think about your daily life, how often are you writing more than a few gigs, or at worst, maybe 100 gigs of data on a large game install at one time? In Atto, some of the weaknesses of the drive get revealed, though. So while our stock drive was definitely gonna be bottlenecked when it comes to just raw sequential throughput thanks to its PCIe Gen 3 2x rather than 4x interface, this one right here, the 8 terabyte drive, ends up struggling a little bit when it comes to very, very small transfers, and that can be very meaningful to real-world performance because a lot of the things that you do as you're just navigating around your operating system involve moving very small amounts of data. Driving this point home is the PCMark 10 storage benchmark, where our Rocket Q falls about 25% behind in terms of access latency compared to our Intel 660P, which bear in mind, guys, is also a QLC drive, just a 1 terabyte one rather than one that's loaded up with all these chips that supposedly had to compromise on the power consumption of the controller in order to keep its thermals under control. So, is the performance of the Rocket Q 8 terabyte groundbreaking by any stretch of the imagination? No. But is it a solid enough looking drive that has 8 freaking terabytes of storage on it and that is very unlikely to exhaust its SLC cache while you are transferring files to it? Yes. In fact, I want to test that right now. Here we go. Now, this might feel like a bit of an edge case, but I've actually run into it before where I was using a laptop that I didn't realize was actually a TLC SSD, but it had a TLC SSD, and I was just trying to copy over a bunch of Steam game files, and it was going, going, going, going, it's going great, everything was good, and then suddenly, bam, fell down to like 60 megabytes a second. So, let's see how long this can handle it. Because the thing is, we've got high enough speed interfaces just on your typical consumer laptop now, just a simple USB type-C 5 gigabit per second or 10 gigabit per second port that you can actually take advantage of having an NVMe SSD in your system just by plugging in an external drive. So, here we're going at 450 megabytes a second, and this transfer is going to take us half an hour. If we have a drive that conks out in the middle of that transfer, well, that could go from taking half an hour to taking hours, which if you're on location working on a project, for example, can be the difference between wrapping up at the end of the day and not. We're at over 120 gigs transferred now, and it's still going exactly as fast as it was when we started. By contrast, if we were using a 1 terabyte QLC drive with 25% of its area set aside for SLC caching, we would have seen a precipitous drop in performance, probably about halfway through what we've done so far here. 400 gigs now. I'm expecting it to crap out a little bit before 512. It's not going to be like just a nice tidy line, I don't think. We're at 256 gigs remaining, and I'm expecting it to crater at around 208. We'll see how gracefully it handles that transition between writing to the cache and writing to the slower native QLC NAND. There were some compromises. So, Sabren's compatibility is not perfect across laptops. Anthony actually tried a couple of Dells, and because of the higher power consumption of this puppy, they were not able to run it. This ASUS did it okay, but your mileage may vary. So, it's not just a physical imitation in terms of compatibility. We're getting close. We're getting close. We're at 220. Drum roll. 216. My fingers are getting sore. This is supposed to absolutely choke on its own self now. We're at 208 remaining. It's possible that the speed of our red meg, which is actually just an M-SATA SSD in a fancy enclosure, we made a video about that, you can check it out here, is not fast enough to overwhelm even the native QLC write speed. Well, you would need a much, much faster medium that you're ingesting from in order for the caching to even be a problem for a sustained write like this. Well, now we know. That kind of makes sense given who the target audience is for these things. They're targeting enthusiasts, content creators, those sorts of people. So, I'm glad it passed the test here. Not really expecting it to. Now that I know that they actually manage that kind of performance, I guess it makes sense. So, if you guys are interested in checking this out, as always, we're gonna have it linked in the video description. iFixit's ProTech Toolkit is designed to help you tackle any electronics repair challenge. It's got over a dozen different tools, including their 64 steel screwdriver bit kit, the Jimmy, a steel flexible blade that allows for powerful prying, a small suction cup for removing glass panels from a phone or tablet, and the best part is all iFixit tools are backed by a lifetime warranty. You don't need to be a genius to fix your electronics, you just need the right tools. So, visit ifixit.com forward slash Linus and pick up your ProTech Toolkit today. If you guys enjoyed this video, we've actually got a lot more detail on QLC NAND in one of our previous videos covering Intel's first QLC drive, which you can check out right over here at the link down below.