At first, we would like to thank Sabrent for offering a sample of their Rocket 4 Plus NVMe 4.0 Gen4 PCIe M.2 SSD for testing and reviewing.

 

 

About Sabrent:

 

“At Sabrent, we create products that help people realize the power of technology and make people’s lives easier and better.

We have a proven track record to consumers and distribution partners, who are part of the rapidly growing Sabrent family.

 

Deliver the latest technology at an affordable price.

offer a broad product selection, specializing in items that sell.

Maintain large inventory levels and provide same day shipping.

Attractive retail packaging.

Instant live customer service and technical support, including remote access sessions.

No-nonsense product exchanges.

 

Sabrent’s commitment is to offer the latest technology and the highest quality consumer electronic products at an affordable cost to everyone. Since its founding, Sabrent has consistently delivered to market a full line of computer peripherals and accessories that incorporate style, quality and the latest technologies available.”

 

Product Features:

 

PCIe Gen4x4 Interface

Backward Compatible with PCIe 3.0

NVMe M.2 PCIe Gen4 x4 Interface.

PCIe 4.0 Compliant / NVMe 1.3 Compliant.

Power Management Support for APST / ASPM / L1.2.

Supports SMART and TRIM commands.

Supports ONFi 2.3, ONFi 3.0, ONFi 3.2 and ONFi 4.0 interface.

Advanced Wear Leveling, Bad Block Management, Error Correction Code, and Over-Provision

Upgradeable Firmware.

All Sabrent SSDs come with FREE Sabrent Acronis True Image for Sabrent Software for easy Cloning.

 

Product Specifications:

 

Brand: Sabrent

Series: Rocket 4 Plus

Model: SB-RKT4P-2TB

Device Type: Internal Solid-State Drive (SSD)

Used For: Consumer

 

Details

Form Factor: M.2 2280

Capacity: 2TB

Memory Components: 3D TLC NAND

Interface: PCI-Express 4.0 x4

Controller: Phison PS5018-E18

Cache: DDR4

 

Performance

Max Sequential Read: Up to 7000 MBps

Max Sequential Write: Up to 6850 MBps

4KB Random Read: Up to 650,000 IOPS

4KB Random Write: Up to 700,000 IOPS

Terabytes Written (TBW): 1400TB

MTBF: 1,600,000 hours

HeatSink: No

 

Environmental

Operating Temperature: 0°C ~ +70°C

Storage Temperature: -40°C ~ +85°C

Max Shock Resistance: 1500G

 

Dimensions & Weight

Height: 3.60mm

Width: 22.00mm

Depth: 80.00mm

 

In this review we will concentrate our view upon another M.2 SSD from Sabrent, but now taking part of their high-end segment: the Rocket 4 Plus. The drive is available with capacities of 500GB, 1TB, 2TB or even 4TB, while being PCIe 4.0 / NVMe 1.3 compliant, while the maximum read speeds are rated at about 7000MB/s, while the writes at about 6850MB/s.

 

For situations where airflow is a real problem, we can purchase separately the Sabrent Rocket NVMe Heatsink, which will prolong the life of the drive but also avoid throttling.

 

 

 

The Rocket 4 Plus is delivered inside a very compact cardboard enclosure, which shows a photo of the main product, the compatible bus but also the total storage space:

 

 

 

On the back side, we will note a link to online resources but also the product code name and serial number:

 

 

 

Attention of detail is present with this product as well! With the top cardboard layer removed, we will spot an aluminum casing, sporting the same color scheme as the drive. The casing is composed of two parts, which are joined together by a large sticker (which acts as a hinge):

 

 

 

 

 

Inside, we will find the User’s Manual but also the drive, sitting inside a molded protective material:

 

 

 

 

The manual explains the exact steps for installing the drive on your system:

 

 

 

The frontal area of the Rocket 4 Plus does come with a large heatspreader made of a thin sheet of copper:

 

 

 

On the back side we will note a large sticker with additional details regarding the product:

 

 

 

The thin foil of copper can be easily removed; we noted that the underneath components were making good contact, so the heat transfer was optimal:

 

 

 

A closer look does reveal four 3D TLC NAND packages, a DDR4 cache but also the main controller:

 

 

 

The controller is a Phison PS5018-E18-41, built on the TSMC 12nm process, with eight channels, a speed of 1600MT/s per channel and support for DDR4 caching. In terms of architecture we do have a 32-bit ARM Cortex R5 (three CPUs) CoXProcessor Technology processor, data reliability is assured by 4th Gen LDPC engine, End-to-End Data Path Protection and SmartECC and many other security features are included as well:

 

 

 

The cache IC is a K4A8G16 DDR4 from Samsung, runs at 2666MHz and has a capacity of 1GB:

 

 

 

The four IA7BG94AYA NAND ICs are Micron 176-layer 3D TLC, with a capacity of 256GB each:

 

 

 

On the back, we will note four more NAND ICs of the same type, for a total capacity of 2TB, while the second DRAM cache will total 2GB:

 

 

 

The optional Rocket NVMe heatsink comes packed inside a small cardboard enclosure:

 

 

 

A small product description can be noted on the side:

 

 

 

On the back, we will note the main product features, the box contents, the model code name but also its serial number:

 

 

 

After lifting the top cover, we will note the instruction manual on the top:

 

 

 

It covers all the necessary information for mounting the cooling system, in case you have a single-sided or double-sided M.2 SSD:

 

 

 

The heatsink is offered with the necessary tools but also a bunch of screws:

 

 

 

The included screwdriver will help with the installation process:

 

 

 

Single-sided drives need an additional tape to be installed, since their height is lower:

 

 

 

 

The underside aluminum layer includes a pre-installed thermal tape, which helps with heat dissipation for the remaining ICs:

 

 

 

Screw holes are available on both sides:

 

 

 

The main heatsink is made of high-quality materials and sports the Sabrent logo and Rocket brand color scheme on top:

 

 

 

On both sides, we will note heatpipes travelling through the assembly:

 

 

 

 

 

The final thermal pad is included under it:

 

 

 

Let’s install the Rocket 4 Plus 2TB inside our test system and see what we’ve got!

 

 

 

Test Bench:

The test system did incorporate a Ryzen 5 5600X 6-core CPU, two Trident Z RGB 3200MHz 8GB memory modules with 16-18-18-38 XMP 2.0 timings, a PowerColor Red Dragon Radeon RX 5700 video card but also a Patriot Memory Viper VP4100 PCIe 4.0 SSD ; all these were connected to the BIOSTAR B550GTA motherboard. As a power supply we have chosen a Cooler Master 850W non-modular and the system was running the latest Windows 10 OS build as well.

The drive has arrived unformatted, but for testing purposes, we have formatted it NTFS:

 

 

With the help of AIDA64, we could extract more information regarding the drive:

 

 

 

The Tests

 

3DMark

Quick System Drive Benchmark

 

 

CrystalMark HDD Test Suite

 

AIDA64 Disk Test Suite

 

CrystalDisk Test Suite (Random)

 

HDTune Test Suite

Blank SSD

 

PCMark Vantage HDD Test Suite

 

Anvil [Read]

Anvil [Write]

PCMark 10

Quick System Drive Benchmark

 

Extra Tests:

 

AS SSD Benchmark

 

AS SSD Benchmark (IOPS)

Blank SSD

ATTO Disk Benchmark

Blank SSD

 

Before starting to transfer a large quantity of data to the drive in order to prepare it for the second test stage, we checked the IDLE temperature of the drive, which was excellent:

 

 

 

The drive started writing at optimal speed:

 

 

 

During this time, the temperature did barely increase:

 

 

 

After writing more than 155GB of data, the writing speed remained constant:

 

 

 

At the same time, the SSD temperature remained excellent, at just about 50 degrees Celsius:

 

 

 

Transfer speed dropped just after writing about 283GB of data:

 

 

 

At this time, the temperature of the drive has reached about 67 degrees Celsius:

 

 

 

The speed did quickly recover at good levels:

 

 

 

 

 

The temperature of the drive did not pass 65 degrees Celsius:

 

 

 

The transfer rate remained at about 1GB/s while writing the first 576GB of data:

 

 

 

 

We started transferring another set of data to the drive after waiting for about 5 seconds, and it seems that it was able to recover almost completely:

 

 

 

The controller temperature did remain low:

 

 

 

The transfer rate dropped again after writing about 216GB of data:

 

 

 

We noted another drop after about 383 of more data written:

 

 

 

At this time, the drive was struggling with the remaining SLC pseudo-cache and the controller got the temperature to a maximum of 73 degrees Celsius:

 

 

 

There was a slight drop at about 110MB/s, but the drive recovered again quickly:

 

 

 

 

The controller has reached again very good temperature levels:

 

 

 

Transfer rate was hovering at about 850MB/s till the end:

 

 

 

The Tests

 

3DMark

Quick System Drive Benchmark

 

 

CrystalMark HDD Test Suite

 

AIDA64 Disk Test Suite

 

CrystalDisk Test Suite (Random)

 

HDTune Test Suite

Filled SSD

 

PCMark Vantage HDD Test Suite

 

Anvil [Read]

Anvil [Write]

PCMark 10

Quick System Drive Benchmark

 

Extra Tests:

 

AS SSD Benchmark

Filled SSD

AS SSD Benchmark (IOPS)

Filled SSD

ATTO Disk Benchmark

Filled SSD

 

The winning solution we have also found with the Neo Forza NFP425 2TB has been also implemented inside the Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus, incorporating the Phison PS5018-E18 8-channel controller, 2GB of DDR2666 RAM for caching but also Micron’s 176-layer 3D TLC as eight separate ICs. The two models trade punches in most of the tests, no matter if we do talk about an empty or more than half filled drive. The drive can sustain a constant high write speed when working with large quantities of data and if we’ll leave it to recover for a short period of time, it will be in top shape in no time!

 

The HD Tune Write workload can illustrate the speed stages the drive can go through and we were quite amazed to see that it remains quite cool most of the time, when writing to it continuously:

 

 

The high-end Rocket 4 Plus 2TB drive can be found online at Newegg for about $310, a bit more expensive than the NFP425, possibly due to more premium, exotic packaging style.

 

 

Sabrent 2TB Rocket 4 Plus NVMe 4.0 Gen4 PCIe M.2 SSD is Recommended for:

 

 

We would like to thank again to Sabrent for making this review possible!