Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus Review – TRUE GEN 4 SPEEDS!
When the first wave of PCIe Gen 4 SSDs rolled out, along with the launch of AMD’s Ryzen 3000 series CPUs, they offered impressive headline stats but not too much more. Drives like the original Rocket 4, or the Aorus Gen4, offered between 4 and 5GB/s at peak which while that is a nice improvement over the 3-3.5GB/s you can get with a good gen 3 SSD, it’s nowhere near the maximum allowed by the PCIe Gen 4 interface. That should be around 7-8GB/s. But, now some time has passed and probably most importantly Phison has released their E18 controller which allows for much better use of all that extra bandwidth and some drives are actually shipping with it. One of those drives is this, the Sabrent Rocket 4 PLUS, and it’s mental. So, lets take a look at just how mental it is. But first, if you haven’t already, consider subscribing for more videos every Monday, Wednesday and Friday!
So, the Rocket 4 Plus. It comes in 1 or 2TB flavours at the moment, with a 4TB option ‘coming soon’. The 2TB drive I have is rated for up to 7.1GB/s reads and 6.6GB/s writes, with 1400TBW of endurance and a 5 year (registered) warranty. It’s the standard 2280 size, it’ll drop into any PCIe Gen 4 supported board and chip – at the moment that’s any B550 or X570 motherboard with a Ryzen 3000 or 5000 series CPU, no Intel stuff just yet. And, to make it clear, it will work in older PCIe Gen 3 boards too, it just won’t run at PCIe Gen 4.
As for the physical drive, it comes with a metal sticker to help dissipate heat, although if you can use a heatsink with it, all the better as it does get a little on the hot side. It didn’t thermal throttle with no heatsink though, but it was only a couple degrees off. The 2TB, and the upcoming 4TB, drive is double sided, whereas I believe the 1TB is single sided. All of these drives do have a DRAM cache, and like I said are using the new Phison E18 controller, an upgrade over the E16 in most existing Gen 4 drives.
So, how does it perform? Well, the synthetic tests show it’s raw grunt. In the right conditions, it’ll hit 7.1GB/s in reads, and 6.8GB/s in writes which is mega from a single drive. In more.. Realistic conditions, you are looking at around 6GB/s for writes, and between 6 and 7GB/s for reads, which is still miles clear of even the earlier gen 4 drives like the Rocket 4, and lightyears ahead of a gen 3 drive like the Samsung 970 EVO Plus. Take a look at the plot from ATTO Disk Benchmark. This is at a queue depth of 4, across 512B or 64MB blocks. It’s up across the entire range. And, importantly, with AS SSD and it’s 4K test, especially in reads the new Gen 4 drive sees a significant increase over both the older Gen 4 drive, and the Gen 3 one, where the 970 EVO Plus gets 62MB/s there, the Rocket 4 got 73MB/s, but the new Rocket 4 Plus hits 92MB/s, a sizeable lead.
I also like to run a file duplication test, to stress the controller for both reads and writes simultaneously. The average result I see from Gen 3 drives is around 1GB/s, the first wave of Gen 4 drives normally get 1.3-1.4GB/s, but this one? 1.6GB/s. Almost the same gap from gen 3 to gen 4 again, and the most impressive part is I wrote around 1TB of data all in one go, and experienced no throttling – either from temperature or from caches filling up. It’s amazing.
All that magic comes at a price though, and a hefty one at that. This 2TB model costs a full £100 more than the older Rocket 4, which is already £70 more than the normal gen 3 Rocket. That means you are paying almost double for, yes, almost double the performance, but in the real world for the average gamer you aren’t going to notice. Loading times aren’t much if at all faster on an NVME SSD let alone gen 3 to gen 4, and there really aren’t many use cases for average folk to need one of these. Of course, if you’ve got money to burn this is an amazing drive. Pair it with your 6900XT or 3090 and it’ll fit right in. But for the rest of us, the normal Rocket is still plenty.
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TechteamGB Score
