Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus 2TB Review

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Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus 2TB
Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus 2TB

Today we are taking a look at the brand new Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus 2TB SSD. This is Sabrent’s second-generation high-performance PCIe 4.0 SSD featuring the new Phison PS5018-E18 controller, and currently represents the flagship of Sabrent’s SSD lineup from a performance perspective.

Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus 2TB

The Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus 2TB comes in a double-sided M.2 2280 (80mm) form factor.

Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus 2TB Front
Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus 2TB Front

Much like previous Sabrent drives, the drive label is applied on top of a thin copper heat spreader. Beneath the label and heatspreader there is the Phison PS5018-E18 controller, a DRAM cache, and 4 Micron 96L 256GB NAND packages.

Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus 2TB Back
Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus 2TB Back

The back has a product information label, and beneath that the other 4 256GB NAND packages. That brings the total NAND on the drive to 2048GB, which leaves 48GB reserved by the controller. This configuration is very common on consumer 2TB SSDs.

Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus Specs

The Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus line of TLC-based SSDs has been announced in sizes ranging from 1TB to 4TB, but as of writing this review the 4TB units are not yet available.

Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus 2TB Specs
Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus 2TB Specs

With the 4TB unit not yet available, that leaves our 2TB drive as the top available SKU with a very high rated performance of 7100 MB/s sequential reads and 6600 MB/s sequential writes. Additionally, the 1400 TBW endurance represents a slightly higher rated endurance over some other 2TB drives like the WD Black SN850 and Samsung 970 EVO Plus 2TB, both of which clock in at 1200 TBW. However, even at 1400TBW this represents a big step down in rated endurance from Sabrent’s previous-generation Rocket NVMe 4.0 2TB drive, which had a significantly higher 3600 TBW endurance rating. Still, we can take a pause here and just mention that it would be very unlikely that a M.2 SSD like this would see over a petabyte of writes to it over five years unless it was being used in an application it was not intended for.

Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus 2TB CrystalDiskInfo
Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus 2TB CrystalDiskInfo

CrystalDiskInfo can give us some basic information about the SSD, and confirms we are operating at PCIe 4.0 x4 speeds using NVMe 1.4.

Test System Configuration

We are using the following configuration for this test:

  • Motherboard: ASUS PRIME X570-P
  • CPU: AMD Ryzen 9 3900X (12C/24T)
  • RAM: 2x 16GB DDR4-3200 UDIMMs

Our testing uses the Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus 2TB as the boot drive for the system, installed in the M.2_1 slot on the motherboard. The drive is filled to 85% capacity with data and then some is deleted, leaving around 60% used space on the volume.

Next, we are going to get into our performance testing.

10 COMMENTS

  1. Impressive drive. If this holds up on the datacenter side, lots of people are going to get their links saturated soon. On a side note, I’d like to know when we can start expecting general availability of PCIe 4 datacenter drives, such as Kioxia’s CD6 and Samsung’s offering (if they’ve announced one yet).

    Consumer drives like this have excellent performance, but some PCIe 4 write-optimized drives with PLP will be a welcome sight.

  2. Hello Will,
    Can you try and test the sabrent m.2 with a pci nic? I tried the same m.2 in several server mb but could not get it past the pci enumeration during boot up. This only happened when we had a nic card in one of the pci slots. The same boards worked correctly with the non-plus version of their same m.2. the sabrent rocket plus would boot properly whenever we removed all of the nics. the specific motherboards that we tried were the asrockrack romed8, tyan dual socket rome server (long ass model #!) and supermicro h12ssw-in. All with the same issue, wouldn’t boot when there was any nic (specific nic was a mellanox connectx5-516-cdat dual port 100G pcie 4.0). take all of the nics out and would boot fine. we also did not have any issues with the previous gen of sabrent rocket 1TB (non-plus) gen 4. It was very fast when we removed the nics but couldn’t resolve this issue. we are not sure if it was just a bad m.2 or maybe an issue with nvme 1.4 or 2TB or a combo. Have the 2TB WD black 850 on order to compare.
    Thanks for the review and any insight you can add,
    jp

  3. “Trim $150 off the price and get back to us!”

    Really? What nvme at $250 that is 2TB can even compare to the performance of this drive? In fact its a bit cheaper than the competition that is near that level.

  4. @Mharris. It is the NAND that is by far the largest cost in the BOM, probably over 85 % of the BOM if not 90 % . The only reason they can charge double price for same capacity as PCIE 3.0 drive is because of lack of competition currently. They even use less expensive and lower endurance NAND than previous generation (Samsunf and WD are doing the same) when you think of it the price is actually completely crazy.

  5. @Rodi…again, look at the market, why would they price it even lower when Samsung and WD with comparable drives are priced higher, THAT is my point. I am not talking about what the price should be for all of them, that is a different story of course.

  6. I’m curious about this as a secondary gaming drive. I still feel that something like an Optane is better (Despite lower overall performance) for OS work. Single threaded, random I/O stuff nothing touches the 905p still. I wish Alder Stream would break cover and give us an upgraded option with larger storage.

  7. I would like to see WD SN850 2TB charts with Game Mode On with Latency Test compared to Rocket Plus 2TB. I heard Sn850 is 2 second faster when loading Windows10 and games.

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