Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus 4TB Review

The recently launched flagship 4TB Rocket 4 Plus drive completes the current line-up (at the time of writing) of Sabrent's high-performance PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD family. We've already looked at the 1TB and 2TB models.

The Rocket 4 Plus drives are the first we've seen that uses Phison’s next-generation PS5018-E18 controller. For the 4TB version of the Rocket 4 Plus, Sabrent has used eight (four per side of the PCB) packages of Micron B27B 96-layer 3D TLC NAND to go along with the controller and DRAM cache ICs. Helping to get rid of the heat generated from the drive, the side of the PCB that holds the controller is covered by a full-length product label which includes a layer of copper in its construction.

Following on from the success of the first PCIe Gen 4 controller, the PS5016-E16, the E18 is built on a smaller process, (12nm compared to 28nm) with an increased core count and a faster interconnect speed of 1,600 MT/s, twice that of the E16. The PS5018-E18 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.

Sabrent quote Sequential performance figures for the 4TB Rocket 4 Plus as up to 7,200MB/s for reads and up to 6,900MB/s for writes. Using the ATTO benchmark we couldn’t quite hit those official maximums but the 6,890MB/s read and 6,450MB/s write scores we did achieve are once again the fastest we have seen to date for a PCIe Gen 4 drive, the previous two fastest drives being the 1TB and 2TB versions of the Rocket 4 Plus.

However, we could confirm the Sequential read rating with CrystalDiskMark 7 with the drive producing a peak figure of 7,512MB/s. But as with the ATTO Sequential write figure we were unable to confirm the official figure with CDM Sequential testing, the best we saw was 6,794.9MB/s. The same applied to our own Sequential tests with reads producing 7,106.29MB/s and writes coming in at 6,764.43MB/s.

As for 4K random performance, Sabrent quote figures of up to 650,000 IOPS for reads and up to 700,000 IOPS for writes. The best figures we saw from the drive under testing came from using the Peak Performance profile in CrystalDiskMark 7 with which we were able to confirm the official random read figure with a test result of 655,963 IOPS. However, the write result of 596,309 IOPS was a fair way short of the official figure.

We found the 4TB Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus on Scan UK for £771.98 inc VAT HERE.

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Pros

• Sequential performance.
• Pricing.

Cons

• Need to register the drive before you get the full 5-year warranty period.
• Couldn’t match the official random write figures under testing.
• Needs a PCIe 4.0 supporting motherboard for best performance.

KitGuru says: Sabrent's 4TB Rocket 4 Plus very ably shows the direction of travel for high-performance NVMe drives by making use of the PCIe 4.0 specification together with faster 2nd generation controllers, combined with denser NAND, to produce very fast, high capacity drives.

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