A GAMING SSD? Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus G Review (DirectStorage)

This is the Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus G, an as-they-put-it “Advanced Gaming” SSD that’s specifically designed to work with DirectStorage. If you want to know more about DirectStorage, I have a full video I’ll leave in the cards for you, but in short it’s a way for game engines to load their assets directly to the GPU from your storage, rather than via your CPU which adds latency and bottlenecks. It’s not exactly widely available yet, but it’s expected to become pretty standard, so getting a drive like this that’s specifically made to work well with it sounds like a great idea.

Taking a look under the actual copper label, you’ll find a Phison E18 controller, 2GB of SK Hynix DDR4, and 8 total 256GB chips of Micron 176 layer TLC NAND flash. The technically proficient of you might have clocked that this is rather similar to the standard Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus. In fact, as of 2022, it’s actually the same all round. My older model has 96 layer Micron NAND instead but still uses a Phison E18 controller. So what’s so different then? Well, as far as I’m aware the only major change is a DirectStorage optimised firmware on the G variant. That means that in theory the standard drives could (and I’d argue should) be able to have that firmware patch too.

Now unfortunately I can’t find a way to test DirectStorage myself, however TweakTown do have some simulated results which suggest the firmware changes make a decent difference to the sorts of operations you can expect from DirectStorage games. They show the Rocket 4 Plus Gaming sitting at 7GB/s throughout the entire duration, which is only matched by an Optane drive that costs multiple thousands! Compare that to the WD SN850X which not only sits lower at under 6GB/s, but also has frequent dips in its performance, and it sure looks like the Rocket is a great choice.

As for the benchmarks I can run, well that’s quite interesting. I’ve been using a Ryzen 7900X and ASROCK X670E motherboard for my recent testing, and it seems like these drives aren’t performing quite at their best here as in Crystal Disk Mark my original results from the standard Rocket 4 Plus quite handily beat out the newer gaming version. It’s not exactly a massive deal, as we are talking about 6.5GB/s instead of 6.8GB/s, but it’s interesting to see. What I find more interesting though is the random 4KB block tests. With a queue depth of 32, the gaming drive was the fastest I’ve tested with almost 1GB/s reads, and over 750MB/s writes, compared to 900/700 from the next fastest – that being the Silicon Power XS70 which also has a Phison E18 controller. With a queue depth of 1 the XS70 does offer slightly better writes, although the gaming drive actually beats it in the arguably more important reads.

In AS SSD again at the top end with the sequential read/writes you’ll find the gaming drive in the midfield. Still crazy fast as all gen 4×4 drives, but not reaching it’s full potential with my setup. Again in the random 4KB block size test though its read performance in particular is rather strong. What’s even more impressive is the random 4KB block size, 64 thread test, where it offers the highest read speeds by far, and second highest write speeds too.

In ATTO it’s very much a mirror of the other results, where on the larger block sizes it seems to struggle a little, but on the smaller block sizes it’s one of the faster drives I’ve tested. It isn’t quite as fast as a Solidigm P44 Pro I checked out most recently, but it’s certainly not bad especially for reads.

Lastly in my file duplication test which stresses the controllers read and write performance simultaneously, the Plus G offers pretty exceptional performance. It comfortably sits at 2.2GB/s for over 500GB of data written, and even more impressively even once the SLC cache is very much full, it still was sitting happily at around 1.6GB/s. That’s quite possibly the best result I’ve had here – and just using the motherboard’s built-in heatsink was more than enough with the drive reporting an absolute maximum temp of 73°c after writing well over a terabyte of data all in one go. You certainly can pick up the rainbow aesthetic heatsink alongside this equally shiny rainbow drive, but you really don’t need to.

So everything looks good then, best just to get this new gaming variant so you can be sure your system will work perfectly with DirectStorage then, right? In theory, sure, in practice… Hell no. This 2TB Rocket 4 Plus G is £100 more expensive than the standard Rocket 4 Plus 2TB drive. For the exact same hardware. Sure, the firmware differences might make some difference, but arguably that firmware version should be made available to Rocket 4 Plus drives anyway, and it is no way worth 50% more cash for literally the same drive. If it was a tenner more expensive, I could make the argument it’s worth splashing out on, but at a hundred? Definitely not.