Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus 4TB, M.2 2280 / M-Key / PCIe 4.0 x4, Kühlkörper

The Rocket 4 Plus from Sabrent does offer good performance and quite a bit of capacity when talking about the 4TB SKU, packing the proven Phison PS5018-E18 controller, 2GB of DDR4-2666 DRAM for caching and no less than eight Micron 176-layer 3D NAND TLC ICs. TLCs not only assure a sustained write rate for longer, a higher transfer rate when writing directly to the TLC portion of the chips but are also more durable than QLC, with a rating of 3000TB for the specific 4TB SKU.

Overall, the Rocket 4 Plus is a reasonable all-around Gen4 consumer SSD but it doesn’t stand out in any particular way among Phison E18 drives. The direction Sabrent has gone through is to offer integrated solutions paired with their SSDs in platforms such as the Sony Playstation 5, which gives them reach beyond just the PC gaming arena.

Sabrent has done a really good job at offering the highest capacity M.2 drives on the market. They have been able to offer higher capacities than their slower moving competitors that have to wait for the demand to be high enough to offer such a capacity. Sabrent has been able to capitalize on this and it has helped them build up their brand name and notoriety in the storage industry. Sabrent appears to be the storage company for enthusiasts and we are happy to see a company fill that void.

The Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus comes with up to 4TB of capacity and is a wicked fast NVMe SSD capable of very high performance, but all that flash comes with high power draw and heat output that can cause thermal throttling if your case has less-than-stellar airflow. A $1,000 price tag makes this SSD exclusive to those big spenders wanting the best they can afford.

We know we're already getting people commenting that the tests we perform are synthetic in nature and not truly reflective of real world usage as when you're loading games there isn't much to choose between a PCIe 4.0 drive and a PCIe 3.0 one. Our response to that is, of course not. Games spend so long loading lenthy videos showing off the use of RenderTree or whomever made it that the drive is largely idle. Similarly loading into the game is largely dependant upon your memory speed, or CPU speed, or any number of underlying factors. What we want to do is test the drives at their peak abilities so that in those scenarios where the drive does make a difference you can see how much of a difference it makes. Theoretically a PCIe 4.0 drive could load all of RDR2 into memory in 16 seconds, assuming you had 128GB of RAM on board. Rather than do that and then have massive caveats, we stick to the generalisation that is synthetic tests.