Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus 2TB
A superfast, 2TB second-generation PCIE 4.0 drive that comes in at a decent price? Sign me up, says Alan Dexter.
A superfast second-generation PCIE 4.0 drive at a decent price? Sign me up says Alan Dexter as he takes this well-priced NMVE SSD for a quick spin.
Meet the first drive to use the new Phison E18 controller. This is the followup to the immensely popular Phison E16 controller found in basically every first-generation PCIE 4.0 drive. No, seriously, that’s the controller you’ll find in everything from the CORSAIR MP600, to the GIGABYTE AORUS, to the Addlink S90, in addition to plenty of Sabrent’s drives. And for good reason: it topped out at just over 5,000MB/S for reads, and 4,400MB/S writes, while the best PCIE 3.0 drives managed reads of 3,500MB/S and writes of just 2,500MB/S.
This new Phison E18 controller ups the ante significantly, offering sequential throughput of up to 7,100MB/S reads and 6,600MB/S writes. The theoretical limits of the interface are 8GB/S for both, so those figures aren’t far off how fast you can expect PCIE 4.0 to ever go. It’s incredibly fast, basically, and on paper at least the fastest drive to be released so far.
In order to hit these numbers, you’re going to need a platform that supports it – as in you’ll need a CPU and motherboard that supports the latest PCIE 4.0 interface. At the moment that limits you to a Ryzen 3000 or Ryzen 5000 CPU on an X570 or B550 motherboard. Intel is getting in on the superfast storage game shortly with the launch of Rocket Lake, which is expected to touch down around March 2021.
We have the 2TB drive, which rolls in at a sharpintake-of-breath-inducing £400. The 1TB version costs £199, although the performance is slower too, at 7,000MB/S reads and 5,300MB/S writes. Both work out at £0.20 a gigabyte though, which is very competitive for a new drive.
Generous warranty
Sabrent offers the now-standard five-year warranty for the drive, as long as you register when you buy it. This is good for 1,400 Total Bytes Written (TBW), which is well above what you’ll reasonably manage in that warranty. Sabrent has used well-known components throughout the build, with the Phison Controller being joined by Micron NAND flash and SK Hynix RAM for the cache, so there are no red flags as to potential parts problems with this drive.
Performance is where Sabrent’s latest drive impresses almost effortlessly, especially when it comes to the synthetic throughput. The sequential read 6,988MB/S and write 6,258MB/S figures are impressive, but it’s the write performance that stands out most, leaving the competition eating dust. The Samsung 980 Pro in particular really struggles to keep up with the Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus.
As we’ve seen with previous drives, the synthetic throughput doesn’t always translate to the real world, and this is partly the case here. While the copying of 30GB of files (a Steam game with lots of tiny files and a few chunky ones), comes in competitively at two minutes and 16 seconds (equating to 225MB/S).
Our gaming benchmark loaded the levels in just over seven-and-a-half seconds, which is notably quicker than the first-generation drives, although behind the WD Black SN850.
This is still a fast drive, make no mistake, but the promise of those class-leading synthetic read and write speeds don’t quite translate to class-leading real-world performance. It’s not far off the pace, and your own usage cases may have this in the lead – especially if you need to write out a lot of large files – but for day-to-day use, it has to make do with second place.
If you want the very best performance, then the WD Black SN850 has the edge over this drive. That drive does run hotter than the Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus though. The Rocket Plus 4 is also £50 cheaper than the 2TB WD Black SN850, which makes better value overall.