Sabrent's Rocket 4 Plus is the first PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD drive we've seen that uses the next generation Phison E18 controller. For the Rocket 4 Plus, Sabrent has paired the E18 with 96-layer 3D TLC NAND. Priced at £200 for the 1TB model, we put this drive though its paces to see if it is worth buying. Phison's PS5018-E18 is the company's 2nd generation PCIe Gen 4 NVMe controller building on the success of the PS5016-E16, the world's first PCIe Gen4 controller. It supports the latest NVMe 1.4 protocol. The Rocket 4 Plus is (at the time of writing) available in two capacities, 1TB and 2TB. A flagship 4TB drive is due sometime later in 2021. Sabrent quote Sequential read/write speeds for the 1TB drive as up to 7,000MB/s and 5,300MB/s respectively, while the 2TB drive is rated at up to 7,100MB/s for reads and up to 6,600MB/s for writes. 4K performance for the 1TB drive is quoted as up to 350,000 IOPS for reads and up to 700,000 IOPS for writes, both at QD32. The 2TB drive has the same 4K write rating as the 1TB model but has a higher read performance at 650,000 IOPS. The endurance of the 1TB drive is rated at 700TBW and Sabrent back the drive with 1-years warranty but if you register the drive with them you get a full 5-year warranty. Physical Specifications: Usable Capacities: 1TB. NAND Components: Micron B27B 96-layer 3D TLC NAND. NAND Controller: Phison PS5018-E18. Cache: DDR4. Interface: PCI-e Gen 4 x4 NVMe 1.4. Form Factor: M.2 2280. Dimensions: 22 x 80 x 2.25mm. Firmware Version: RKT4P1.1 The Rocket 4 Plus comes in a diminutive box which weighs a lot more than you'd expect. The front of the box has an image of the drive with the capacity displayed in the bottom right-hand corner. The rear of the box carries a different view of the drive along with the drive's product number. Once opened the reason for the weight becomes obvious, the drive itself comes packed in a classy copper-coloured metal box, a really nice touch that from Sabrent. Built on a single-sided M.2 2280 format, the 1TB Rocket 4 Plus uses four packages of Micron B27B 96-layer 3D TLC NAND which sit alongside the Phison PS5018-E18 controller and a single SK Hynix DDR4 DRAM IC. To help keep the components cool they sit under a copper heat spreader label. The PS5018-E18 is an 8-channel controller built on a 12nm process using Triple ARM Cortex R5 CPU's with CoXProcessor Technology with an interface speed of up to 1,600MT/s per channel and it supports the latest NVMe 1.4 specifications. The E18 supports Phison's 4th Gen LDPC engine and comes with End-To-End Data Path Protection. It supports AES 128/256bit hardware encryption and TCG & Opal 2.0, Pyrite, Sanitize and Crypto Erase technologies. Sabrent's SSD management software goes by the name Rocket Control Panel. It has a fancy, easy to use GUI and it allows you to all the usual things like checking the drive's health and updating the firmware. It also has a link to download a copy of Acronis True Image for Sabrent. For testing, the drives are all wiped and reset to factory settings by HDDerase V4. We try to use free or easily available programs and some real world testing so you can compare our findings against your own system. This is a good way to measure potential upgrade benefits. Main system: AMD Ryzen 5 3600X, 16GB DDR4-2400, Sapphire R9 390 Nitro and an MSI MPG X570 Gaming Edge Wifi motherboard Other drives: Corsair Force MP600 1TB Patriot Viper VPN4100 1TB Samsung SSD980 PRO 1TB Seagate FireCuda 520 1TB Teamgroup T-Force Cardea Zero Z440 1TB WD Black SN850 1TB Software: Atto Disk Benchmark 4. CrystalMark 7.0.0. AS SSD 2.0. IOMeter. Futuremark PC Mark 10. All our results were achieved by running each test five times with every configuration this ensures that any glitches are removed from the results. Trim is confirmed as running by typing fsutil behaviour query disabledeletenotify into the command line. A response of disabledeletenotify =0 confirms TRIM is active. CrystalDiskMark is a useful benchmark to measure theoretical performance levels of hard drives and SSD’s. We are using v7.0 to test NVMe drives. Looking at the two CrystalDiskMark result screens it appears that the new E18 controller is much more efficient when reading compressible 4K data at certain queue depths. We can also confirm the official Sequential read/write performance of 7,000MB/s and 5,300MB/s respectively using CrystalDiskMark. CrystalDiskMark, version 7, includes a couple of profiles that can be used for testing – Peak Performance and Real World. The result screens for these two profiles not only display MB/s results but also IOPS and latency. Looking at the results for Sequential read/write performance we could confirm both official Sequential performance figures. The drive is rated up to 7,000MB/s for reads, with the tested drive producing a best of 7,401MB/s and up to 5,300MB/s for writes, with the best test result of 5,303MB/s. When it comes to random performance the drive is rated as up to 350,000 IOPS for reads and up to 700,000 IOPS for writes. As you can see from the Peak Performance results we could confirm the random read figure with the drive producing a test result figure of 362, 551 IOPS but sadly the best write test result was way of the official maximum figure at 343,685 IOPS. We also used CrystalDiskMark 7 to test the random performance of the drive at lower queue depths (QD1 – QD8) where most of the everyday workloads occur) using 1 to 4 threads. The Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus read performance climbs smoothly throughout the tested queue depths and threads with a peak performance figure of 265,073 IOPS (1,085MB/s) at QD8. In the write tests, the best performance was a pretty close run thing between using 3 threads (351,320 IOPS) and 4 threads (354,528 IOPS) at QD8. Whereas the four threaded test climbed relatively smoothly through the queue depths, the three threaded test plateaued out between QD2 and QD4 before accelerating between QD4 and QD8. The ATTO Disk Benchmark performance measurement tool is compatible with Microsoft Windows. Measure your storage systems performance with various transfer sizes and test lengths for reads and writes. Several options are available to customize your performance measurement including queue depth, overlapped I/O and even a comparison mode with the option to run continuously. Use ATTO Disk Benchmark to test any manufacturers RAID controllers, storage controllers, host adapters, hard drives and SSD drives and notice that ATTO products will consistently provide the highest level of performance to your storage. We are using version 4.0 for our tests. Sabrent rate the 1TB Rocket 4 Plus at up to 7,000MB/s for Sequential reads and while we couldn't quite match that maximum figure with the ATTO benchmark result of 6,820MB/s, but even so, that test result makes the drive the fastest Gen 4 drive we have seen to date. In a similar vein, we couldn't match the official maximum Sequential write rating of 5,300MB/s with a test result figure of 4,950MB/s, but once again it's the fastest we've seen to date for a Gen 4 drive. AS SSD is a great free tool designed just for benching Solid State Drives. It performs an array of sequential read and write tests, as well as random read and write tests with sequential access times over a portion of the drive. AS SSD includes a sub suite of benchmarks with various file pattern algorithms but this is difficult in trying to judge accurate performance figures. The drive's AS-SSD read score of 2,559 puts it into third place in our results chart. But it does have the second-best write score we've seen to date - 2,951, which is a tiny bit behind WD's Black SN850 but a good deal faster than Samsung's SSD980 PRO. IOMeter is another open-source synthetic benchmarking tool which is able to simulate the various loads placed on the hard drive and solid-state drive technology. There are many ways to measure the IOPS performance of a Solid State Drive, so our results will sometimes differ from the manufacturer’s quoted ratings. We do test all drives in exactly the same way, so the results are directly comparable. We test 128KB Sequential read and write and random read and write 4k tests. The test setup’s for the tests are listed below. Each is run five times. 128KB Sequential Read / Write. Transfer Request Size: 128KB Span: 8GB Thread(s): 1, Outstanding I/O: 1-32 Test Run: 20 minutes per test 4K Sustained Random Read / Write. Transfer Request Size: 4KB Span: 80GB Thread(s): 4, Outstanding I/O: 1-32 Test Run: 20 minutes per test 4K Random 70/30 mix Read/Write. Transfer Request Size: 4KB Span: 80GB Reads: 70% Writes: 30% Thread(s): 4 Outstanding I/O: 2 – 32 Test Run: 20 minutes. With our own Sequential tests we couldn't quite hit the official maximum of 7,000MB/s but we weren't far short at 6,931MB/s. When it came to Sequential writes, we did a tiny bit better than the official maximum of 5,300MB/s at 5,364MB/s. 128KB Sequential Read Performance compared Compared to the other Gen 4 drives we've tested, the Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus sits at the bottom of our performance charts until the QD32 test where it steams up the chart to sit in third place behind the WD Black SN850 and the Samsung SSD980 PRO. 128KB Sequential Write Performance compared Unlike the Sequential read performance, in the Sequential write tests, there wasn't a QD where the Rocket 4 Plus isn't the fastest drive we've seen to date. Sabrent quote a maximum 4K random read figure for the drive of 350,000 IOPS for the Rocket 4 Plus. The best we saw from the drive using our own 4-threaded tests was 263,363 IOPS at a QD of 16. 4K Random Read v QD Performance compared Sabrent's Rocket 4 Plus sits in third place in our charts behind the WD Black SN850 and Samsung SSD980 PRO at a QD of 1. As the queue depth deepens the drive begins to drop back until by QD32 it's sitting at the bottom of the list. The official 4K random write rating for the Rocket 4 Plus is up to 700,000 IOPS. As you can see from our 4-threaded test results we couldn't get close to that figure, the best we saw was 324,013 IOPS at QD32. We did a quick test at QD32 using 8 threads and saw the IOPS figure rise to 490,121 IOPS. 4K Random Write v QD Performance compared At QD1, the Rocket 4 Plus tops the results chart at 168,361 IOPS. At QDs 2 and 4, it falls below the Samsung and WD drives before climbing above the Samsung drive into second place behind WD's Back SN850 drive at QD32. Sabrent's Rocket 4 Plus displays strong performance in our 70/30 read/write mixed test. In our read throughput test the Rocket 4 Plus peaked at 5,172MB/s (16MB block), putting it into second place behind WD's Black SN850 drive. In our write throughput test, the drive is climbing pretty smoothly as the test progresses, peaking at 5,411 (4MB block mark) until it hits the 8MB block mark where there is a drop in performance. The drive does recover quickly though to finish the test run at 5,318MB/s. The PCMark 10 Full System Drive Benchmark uses a wide-ranging set of real-world traces from popular applications and common tasks to fully test the performance of the fastest modern drives. The benchmark is designed to measure the performance of fast system drives using the SATA bus at the low end and devices connected via PCI Express at the high end. The goal of the benchmark is to show meaningful real-world performance differences between fast storage technologies such as SATA, NVMe, and Intel’s Optane. The Full System Drive Benchmark uses 23 traces, running 3 passes with each trace. It typically takes an hour to run. Traces used: Booting Windows 10. Adobe Acrobat – starting the application until usable. Adobe Illustrator – starting the application until usable Adobe Premiere Pro – starting the application until usable. Adobe Photoshop – starting the application until usable. Battlefield V – starting the game until the main menu. Call of Duty Black Ops 4 – starting the game until the main menu. Overwatch – starting the game until main menu. Using Adobe After Effects. Using Microsoft Excel. Using Adobe Illustrator. Using Adobe InDesign. Using Microsoft PowerPoint. Using Adobe Photoshop (heavy use). Using Adobe Photoshop (light use). cp1 Copying 4 ISO image files, 20 GB in total, from a secondary drive to the target drive (write test). cp2 Making a copy of the ISO files (read-write test). cp3 Copying the ISO to a secondary drive (read test). cps1Copying 339 JPEG files, 2.37 GB in total, to the target drive (write test). cps2 Making a copy of the JPEG files (read-write test). cps3 Copying the JPEG files to another drive (read test). The Rocket 4 Plus makes a good fist of PCMark10’s Full System Drive benchmark displaying good performance in all the test traces. Overall in PCMark 10’s Full System Drive benchmark, the Rocket 4 Plus sits behind WD's Black SN850 and Samsung SSD980 PRO. It is the fastest of the Phison powered drives we've tested to date. For the long term performance stability test, we set the drive up to run a 20-minute 4K random test with a 30% write, 70% read split, at a Queue Depth of 256 over the entire disk. The 1TB Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus averaged 83,504 IOPS for the test with a performance stability of 55%. To test real-life performance of a drive we use a mix of folder/file types and by using the FastCopy utility (which gives a time as well as MB/s result) we record the performance of drive reading from & writing to a 256GB Samsung SSD850 PRO. We use the following folder/file types: 100GB data file. 60GB iso image. 60GB Steam folder – 29,521 files. 50GB File folder – 28,523 files. 12GB Movie folder – (15 files - 8 @ .MKV, 4 @ .MOV, 3 @ MP4). 10GB Photo folder – (304 files - 171 @ .RAW, 105 @ JPG, 21 @ .CR2, 5 @ .DNG). 10GB Audio folder – (1,483 files - 1479 @ MP3, 4 @ .FLAC files). 5GB (1.5bn pixel) photo. BluRay Movie - 42GB. 21GB 8K Movie demos - (11 demos) 16GB 4K Raw Movie Clips - (9 MP4V files). 4.25GB 3D Printer File Folder - (166 files - 105 @ .STL, 38 @ .FBX, 11 @ .blend, 5 @ .lwo, 4 @ .OBJ, 3@ .3ds). 1.5GB AutoCAD File Folder (80 files - 60 @ .DWG and 20 @.DXF). Sabrent's Rocket 4 Plus dealt with our real-life file transfers without any problems, showing very good consistency of performance for both reads and writes when dealing with the larger file sizes. To get a measure of how much faster PCIe NVMe drives are than standard SATA SSD's we use the same files but transfer to and from a 512GB Toshiba OCZ RD400: Switching over to the NVMe drive to transfer data to and from the Rocket 4 Plus saw transfer speeds for the large file transfers rocket and times taken drop dramatically. Eight of the transfers topped well over 2GB/s with six of the eight climbing above 2.5GB/s. Of the remaining five tests, two topped 1GB/s. Since the arrival of the first Gen 4 NVMe SSD's in early 2020, there has been a bit of a lull in new drives appearing but towards the end of the year, there was a rush of activity with new drives from Samsung and WD, both using in-house controllers. Sabrent has also come to market with the Rocket 4 Plus, using the second generation Phison controller, the PS5018-E18. Phison's E18 controller follows on from the world's first Gen 4 controller, the PS5016-E16. Built from the ground up on a 12nm process (the PS5016-E16 used a 28nm process) the 8-channel E18 features triple ARM Cortex R5 cores as opposed to the two in the E16 and also has a pair of CoXprocessors as well. The controller connects to the NAND at up to 1,600 MT/s, twice that of the E16 and can support up to 8TB of NAND. It uses Phison's 4th Gen LDPC engine with End-to-End Data Path Protection and SmartECC. AES 128/256-Bit hardware encryption with Crypto Erase is supported along with TCG OPAL 2.0 and Pyrite. For the Rocket 4 Plus, Sabrent has combined the E18 with, in the case of the 1TB drive, four packages of Micron B27B 96-layer 3D TLC NAND. As all Gen 4 drives get pretty toasty when they are pushed, Sabrent has used a layer of copper in the label that covers the components to help get rid of the heat. Sabrent quote Sequential read/write figures for the 1TB drive as up to 7,000MB/s and up to 5,300MB/s respectively. Using the ATTO benchmark we couldn’t quite match those maximums, the tested drive producing a read figure of 6,820MB/s and a write figure of 4,950MB/s. Even though we couldn’t match the official numbers, those read and write ATTO results are the fastest we have seen to date for a PCIe Gen 4 drive. Using our own Sequential tests we again fell a little short of the maximum read figure at 6,931MB/s. However, we could confirm the write figure with a test result of 5,364MB/s. As for random 4K performance, Sabrent quotes a read figure of up to 350,000 IOPS and a write figure of up to 700,000 IOPS for the 1TB drive. Using our 4-threaded tests, the best read figure we saw was 263,363 IOPS at a QD of 16. As for random writes, we couldn't get close with our standard tests, the best we saw being 324,013 (QD32). We did a quick test at QD32 using 8 threads and saw the IOPS figure climb to 490,121 IOPS. We found the 1TB Sabrent Rocket 4 Pro for £199.99 (inc VAT) on Amazon.co.uk HERE. Pros Sequential performance. Pricing. Cons Need to register the drive before you get the full warranty period. Couldn't match the official random write figures under testing. KitGuru says: Sabrent's Rocket 4 Plus is the first drive we've seen that uses the second generation Phison Gen 4 NVMe controller and it uses it to good effect. It's a fast drive that comes with a keen price tag and should stir up the market segment quite nicely.
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