Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus, M.2

The Sabrent heat sink provides an easy way to cool down the SSD, and installing it is easy, since it is a direct replacement of the OEM part.

Another day, another review of an SSD drive. What we have today is a brand that is not officially available in the Malaysian market. That brand is Sabrent. Founded and launched in the great land of the USA, we got this drive via Amazon US so you know we paid a fortune for it (especially for shipping).

With the new B47 firmware the fastest just got faster. Not in absolute linear performance, but random 4K files performance jumped up really significantly. And that's what a lot of people are after. For the peak 7 Gb/sec values I can only say this; you are unlikely to require 7 GB/sec SSD reading and writing performance on your storage unit anytime soon, but you can have it if you want it... and the great part is that Sabrent does provide it for 15 cents per GB now. That pricing is comparable to Samsung's 980 PRO 2TB SSD, which is slower and has less (but still enough) durability. As stated, we honestly think you're not going to notice the real-world effect and difference between a 3GB/sec or a 7GB/sec SSD anytime soon. If an application loads up in a split second, then a fraction of that split second is what it will be faster. For complex workloads like video editing, capturing, etc., that's where the money is better spent, of course. Other than that somewhat personal remark, all lights are green, TLC, high endurance, price, warranty and the new B47 firmware making small file performance significantly faster. There's little to complain about. Kindly place the SSD behind the heatsink provided by the motherboard. It is not running at a high temperature, but if it were, this would avoid thermal throttling. The controller status indicates temperatures at 6070 degrees Celsius when it is seated behind a heatsink. To get the most out of it, you'll need a PCIe Gen 4 infrastructure, which at the time of writing implies a compatible Ryzen CPU running on a B550 or X570 chipset. Intel also began supporting PCIe gen 4.0 and even 5.0, for best performance on an Intel platform we'd advice Alder Lake and B660/Z690. The Rocket 4 PLUS has sufficiently been buffered by a pseudo-SLC write cache and 1 GB of DRAM buffer for the 1TB model, 2GB for the 2 TB model. We encountered no TLC write holes that matter. When the conditions are correct, the unit will make you shiver with performance, and when they are not, you will be limited to high-end NVMe performance on select workloads. NVMe protocol version 1.4; this SSD is one of the first to support the new NVMe 1.4 standard. You do not need to install any additional drivers; only ensure that your operating system is up to date. After that, install and format the SSD, and you're good to go. Sabrent hands out a five-year warranty or the indicated TBW value, you must register to be eligible. That concludes our discussion; for 15 cents per GB, Sabrent does provide an attractive product. Whether or whether you'd ever require this degree of performance is another matter. However, the benefit of the sector moving forward is that things accelerate in the lower end and mainstream segments as well. That is, 3 GB/sec NVMe SSDs are becoming more prevalent these days and are already regarded to be mainstream; think about that for a moment. If you want it, this is an excellent offer; in fact, if prices continue to fall, I'd even give it a value award. However, for the time being, advised. Highly recommended. For those already owning this SSD, you can upgrade your firmware. For all new purchases, the B47 firmware has already been implemented.

The Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus is based on the highly popular Phison E18 controller, which is among the fastest available and has the Rocket 4 Plus beat out solid-state drives with controllers from WD and Samsung. Phison's PS5018-E18 controller is a high-end eight-channel model based on a multi-core ARM design fabricated at TSMC using 12 nanometer technology. This controller seems to be all the rage these days—we've encountered it in most of our recent SSD reviews. Other important components of the drive are 96-layer 3D TLC flash from Micron and 2 GB of fast DDR4-2666 DRAM cache, which helps achieve the best performance during random write activity. While the 96-layer TLC flash is slowly getting replaced by the slightly more modern 176-layer NAND from Micron, which offers slightly higher performance in some cases, the differences aren't that big. The unique selling point of the drive is support for the PCI-Express 4.0 interface, which has become mainstream thanks to AMD's Ryzen processors. Intel has added support for PCIe 4.0 since Rocket Lake, which should help the push for PCIe 4.0 SSDs. Physically, the Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus seems identical to the Phison E18 reference design, which also makes it identical to the Corsair MP600 Pro and Addlink S95.

Holy Mozes, each time we test a new generation controller on an NVMe SSD, we get a little shocked and awed more. This was the first Phison controller PS5018-E18 based product we got our hands-on, and 'son; I am not disappoint' as this is just a stupendous amount of read/write performance. That said, in this conclusion, we are going to talk a little about relativity, though, as breaking that 7 GB/sec marker isn't necessarily going to make your gaming PC a lot faster, and that is the honest truth. However, Sabrant is making this a very extraordinary product, as it isn't super expensive either. Yes, you pay a premium for this 7 GB/sec NVMe SSD, but at 20 cents per GB, I'm drawing that good old value card here. This is a super-fast SSD, TLC written, plenty of endurance, and a 5-year warranty. At that money, you'd be hard-pressed to not like this product, eh? See, I like the 'Amazon' based companies; they are more or less price fighters and bring that extra mile towards the consumer at a more fair price.

The Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus is the company’s newest addition to their NVMe PCIe Gen4 portfolio. Released back in December, the Rocket 4 Plus comes equipped with the new Phison PS5018-E18 controller, which was demonstrated at the CES 2021 in January, and features TLC NAND and DDR4 cache. It currently is available in capacities up to 2TB, with the 4TB model expected to be available in the coming months.

The Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus pairing continue the outstanding performance we've been seeing from Sabrent products recently, with both the 1TB model and particularly the 2TB one having absolutely barnstorming performance. It wasn't that long ago that we reviewed the Samsung 980 Pro and its Elpis controller and we didn't imagine anything would get close to it for a long time. We've looked at a fair few PCIe 4.0 drives and it was comfortably the class leader, far beyond anything else we'd reviewed.

Put the Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus on the short list if you care about performance and value. This Rocket 4 Plus delivers paramount benchmark numbers without breaking the bank.

The Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus 8TB is the latest drive in Sabrent’s broad portfolio of NVMe Gen4 PCIe M.2 SSDs. This family of drives is based on the Phison PS5018-E18 controller and Micron B47R 3D NAND TLC memory and features 500GB, 1TB, 2TB, and 4TB models as well. While there is not a lot of new ground with this new capacity point, it is much larger than what other current TLC SSD lines offer, which most often only feature a maximum of 2TB and top out at 4TB. The 8TB Rocket 4 Plus is also faster than Sabrent’s QLC equivalent and only costs $100 more.

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.

Well, the MP400 is an interesting SSD to see come out this late in the game. Most companies have been focusing on their PCIe Gen 4 options but there are a lot of people who can’t even run Gen 4 SSDs yet so spending the higher prices on one wouldn’t make sense. I like the idea of bringing out lower-priced options for the mainstream. Corsair also has higher capacities in mind here. The MP400 is only available in 1TB, 2TB, 4TB, and 8TB which is getting into the range where you aren’t worried about storage anymore where some of the lower capacity M.2 drives may still mean you need a traditional SSD or hard drive if you data horde or have a lot of games that you play.

Having already reviewed the Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus when it came with a different type of NAND on board, a lot of what we felt then remains true because so much of the design and pricing is the same as it was when we looked at it 12 months ago.

The Rocket 4 Plus 1TB has performed as expected given the fact that we are dealing with half of the NAND ICs we have had with the 2TB SKU, so implicitly a smaller quantity of pseudo-SLC cache, while the DDR4 cache was clocked a bit lower. Thanks to the use of TLC NAND, the functionality of the drive is very little affected in terms of performance when having it over 50% filled, but when writing very large quantities of data to it at once, it tends to overheat and throttle.

Elite PS5 performance and elite PC performance. Sabrent's Rocket 4 Plus with B47R is exceptional.