Sabrent Rocket 4.0 PCIe 4 NVMe SSD Review

Today we take a look at another Gen.4 PCIe SSD which allows us to take performance to a whole new level. While the impressive performance is limited to the latest AMD system so far, there are a lot of people with those systems. Today it is the Rocket 4.0 from Sabrent with a capacity of 1TB that I have on the test bench. Sabrent Rocket 4.0 NVMe SSD The Rocket 4.0 starts out as a basic drive as we've seen so many. It is a standard NVMe 1.3 compliant M.2 drive with a 2280 form factor. As such, it will fit into most modern systems. But it isn't a classic PCIe 3.0 drive like the ones I've been testing the last couple of years, this is one of the new PCIe 4.0 drives. This allows the drive to deliver better performance thanks to more bandwidth being available. There are two versions of the Sabrent Rocket 4.0 available, one with a heatsink and one without. If your motherboard already has a heatsink for its M.2 slots, get the one without. If not, then get the one with the heatsink. These PCIe 4.0 drives can get quite hot and it is highly recommended that you use one to prevent thermal throttling. As far as features go, you get what you would expect from such a drive. The Sabrent Rocket 4.0 supports SMART and TRIM commands as well as Advanced Wear Leveling, Bad Block Management, LDPC Error Correction Code, and Over-Provision. As far as hardware goes, the drive is built with Toshiba's 96-layer BiCS4 flash and the Phison E16 (PS5016-E16) controller. As such, we should get some great performance and endurance. The drive also features DDR4 cache in case you wonder about that. Performance and Endurance Let us get to the thing I'm sure you're here to find out, the performance ratings. The Sabrent Rocket 4.0 is rated for up to 5000MB/s when reading and 4400MB/s when writing sequential data. When it comes to random performance, it is rated for up to 750K IOPS at both reading and writing. Endurance is at least as important as performance and the Rocket 4.0 doesn't let us down here either. It has a TBW rating of 1800TB per 1TB capacity, an MTFB of 1.7 million hours, and it is backed by a 5-year warranty. That's not bad at all, no sir. This is what we like to see. What Does Sabrent Have To Say? "The Sabrent 1TB Rocket Nvme PCIe 4.0 M.2 2280 Internal SSD Extreme Performance Solid State Drive (SB-ROCKET-NVMe4-1TB) delivers all the advantages of flash disk technology with PCIe Gen4.0 x4 interface.Based on Toshiba’s BiCS4 96L TLC NAND Flash memory, its performance speeds can reach up to 5000 MB/s (read) and 4400 MB/s (write) when using a PCIe Gen4 motherboard. Using a PCIe Gen3 Motherboard Speeds will reach up to 3400 MB/s (read) and 3000 MB/s (write). Power consumption is much lower than traditional hard drives, making it the best embedded solution for new systems.The Sabrent 1TB Rocket Nvme PCIe 4.0 M.2 2280 Internal SSD was designed using PCIe 4.0 which allows for speeds of up to 5000 MB/s (read) and 4400 MB/s (write), significantly faster than PCIe 3.0." You can read more about the drive and its details on the official product page and series page. Can I Run This Drive in a PCIe 3.0 System? The short answer is yes. There is nothing which prevents you from using the Sabrent Rocket 4.0 in a PCIe 3.0 motherboard or controller. That said, you won't get the full speed as the older bus will limit the drive through the available bandwidth. However, if you're planning to upgrade to a PCIe 4.0 motherboard shortly, you don't have to stick with a PCIe 3 drive for it until you do. Make the Rocket 4.0 the first step in your upgrade. Feature Highlights Up to 5000MB/s and 750K IOPS performanceBuilt with Phison E16 controller and BiCS4 NANDPCIe 4.0 NVMe drive5-year warranty (with registration)Available with and without heatsinkQuality packaging and Acronis True Image included Specifications You can find further information and full details of the Sabrent Rocket 4.0 drive on its official product page. Package and Accessories Good things come in small packages and that's very true for the Sabrent Rocket 4.0 drive. Despite the small package and it being a M.2 2280 drive, it is quite heavy. But we'll get to the reason for that in a minute. The exterior is beautiful with full colour print of the included drive. There aren't a whole lot of details on the box, but you probably knew all them before your purchase anyway. Removing the exterior cardboard box will reveal the interior box, and the reason why the package weighs as it does. It is a beautiful metal box which holds all the parts. Opening the box and we see a manual and a well packed drive, securely packed in foam and with a protective piece on top. This makes sure that the drive will arrive in perfect condition. There are no big surprises as such within the package, except the quality of it. I like a well packed drive, even if it doesn't matter for the performance. It shows that the company is proud of its product and want you to feel the premium quality that it is. Here you see the drive and the top foam cover next to the included manual. The manual, which a lot will think is unnessesary, is also high-end quality. It shows those who don't know how to install an M.2 drive how it is done and this is also where you'll learn about the included copy of Acronis True Image cloning software. The manual features full-colour print too which again shows you that this is a premium drive. Testing & Methodology In a bid to make our testing as thorough and as accurate as possible, we have devised a testing methodology that will give us the maximum amount of data. While this means that testing each drive will take considerably longer – easily up 36 hours – the overall picture that we can gather is bigger too. It helps both you as the reader and us as the reviewer’s to gain a clearer view of the drive’s overall performance, strengths, and weaknesses. It also provides a more accurate analysis of how each drive performs under different conditions. Data Fillage There are many ways to test a storage drive, and we have chosen to include close to every test possible. We will start with a typical benchmark analysis of the formatted drive with various fillage scenarios. However, depending on how a drive is built, the performance may differ depending on how much data it is already storing. For this area, the drive will be tested empty as well as with 25%, 50%, and 75% space usage. We're using Anvil’s Storage Utilities, AS SSD Benchmark, ATTO Benchmark, and CrystalDiskMark for this part of the review. Application and Gaming Besides the synthetic fill tests, the drive is tested with PCMark 8’s storage benchmark to get real-world performance results for various gaming and application usages. Plain Drive Performance Following the fillage tests, the partition gets removed, and we check the drive’s raw performance. These tests will determine the hardware’s capabilities while eliminating any interference from the set file system. AIDA64’s storage benchmark and IOmeter are both great tools for this, and they help us paint an even clearer picture of the drive. Drive Conditioning Durability is a vital factor when it comes to NAND-based drives as the chips only can be rewritten so many times before they’ll stop working properly. Modern SSDs come with wear-level algorithms to increase the lifetime and reduce this factor as much as possible. We also take this into consideration in our reviews even though it would take years to simulate this under real-world conditions. Luckily, Anvil’s Storage Utilities comes with an endurance test that can perform this action much faster, but it is still a time-consuming process. Depending on the hardware, this can easily take several days, and we write thousands and thousands of small files in various sizes and compressibility to drive over and over. Following this conditioning process, all of the previous benchmarks will be run again in the same scenarios and the same order. This will give us a great view of how a drive will perform after prolonged usage, and that is a very vital factor when you pick out your storage drive. The Preparation and In Between The drive will be formatted as NTFS with default settings, as most users will do. The quick format option isn’t used as that might affect the performance the first time data is written. Modern operating systems all take care of the TRIM command in the background and it isn’t something to worry about for regular users. However, for these reviews, I will add a waiting period between each benchmark to make sure that the TRIM command has been fully executed and finished. After all, we want a clear picture of the drive’s performance with minimal interference from the operating system. On each page that follows with the benchmark results, I have inserted result screenshots from the benchmarks, created drive analysis chart for the fill-level performance, and added drive comparison charts where possible. Hardware MSI MEG X570 GodlikeAMD Ryzen 7 3800XASUS ROG Strix RX570Crucial Ballistix Sport DDR4 2400MHz (4x8GB)Toshiba OCZ VX500 512GB SSDbe quiet! Dark Power Pro 11 (1200W)Noctua NH-D15SCooler Master HAF XB EVO with Noctua NF-A14 FLX fans Software AIDA64 Storage Benchmark Anvil's Storage UtilitiesAS SSD BenchmarkATTO BenchmarkCrystalDiskMarkIOMeterPCMark 8 Storage BenchmarkWindows 10 AIDA64 Storage Benchmark AIDA64 is a streamlined Windows diagnostic and benchmarking software for home users with a broad range of features to assist in overclocking, hardware error diagnosis, stress testing, and sensor monitoring. The app has unique capabilities to assess the performance of the processor, system memory, and disk drives and is compatible with most Microsoft Windows operating systems. It also has a disk benchmark tool, and that is the one I’ll be using. Fresh Drive The Linear Read and Write tests measure the sequential performance by reading or writing all sectors without skipping any. It gives us a view of the drives overall performance from start to end. The Random Read and Write tests measure the random performance by reading or writing variable-sized data blocks at random locations on the surface of the drive. The Random tests are a combination of both speed and access times as it moves the position before each new operation. The Access Time tests are designed to measure the data access performance by reading or writing small 0.5KB data blocks at random locations on the drive surface. Conditioned Drive The Linear Read and Write tests measure the sequential performance by reading or writing all sectors without skipping any. It gives us a view of the drives overall performance from start to end. The Random Read and Write tests measure the random performance by reading or writing variable-sized data blocks at random locations on the surface of the drive. The Random tests are a combination of both speed and access times as it moves the position before each new operation. The Access time tests are designed to measure the data access performance by reading or writing small 0.5KB data blocks at random locations on the drive surface. Drive Analysis Anvil's Storage Benchmark Anvil’s Storage Utilities is a complete benchmark solution used to test any writeable storage drive. It also has a drive endurance test that consistently reads and writes data to the selected medium to deliver days, months, and potentially even years of use in a shorter period. Fresh Drive Conditioned Drive Drive Analysis With the performance analysis, we get a good view of the drive’s consistency. We want as straight a line as possible for a good result. Drive Comparison For the drive comparison, we will use the performance figures from empty drives here. AS SSD Storage Benchmark The AS SSD software determines the performance of Solid State Drives (SSD). The tool contains five synthetic and three practice tests. The synthetic tests determine the sequential and random read and write performance of the SSD, and they aren’t using the operating system cache. The copy tests are cached and as such not viable results at this time. Fresh Drive Conditioned Drive Drive Analysis With the performance analysis, we get a good view of the drive’s consistency. We want as straight a line as possible for a good result. Drive Comparison For the drive comparison, we will use the performance figures from empty drives here. ATTO Disk Benchmark 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 customise your performance measurement including queue depth, overlapped I/O and even a comparison mode with the option to run continuously. Fresh Drive Conditioned Drive Drive Analysis With the performance analysis, we get a good view of the drive’s consistency. We want as straight a line as possible for a good result. Drive Comparison For the drive comparison, we will use the performance figures from empty drives here. CrystalDiskMark CrystalDiskMark is a small HDD and SSD benchmark utility that allows you to measure a drive’s sequential and random performance. Fresh Drive Conditioned Drive Drive Analysis With the performance analysis, we get a good view of the drive’s consistency. We want as straight a line as possible for a good result. Drive Comparison For the drive comparison, we will use the performance figures from empty drives here. PCMark 8 Storage Benchmark PCMark 8 Storage benchmark tests the performance of SSDs, HDDs, and SSHD hybrid drives with traces recorded from Adobe Creative Suite, Microsoft Office and a selection of games. You can test any recognised storage device, including local external drives. Unlike synthetic storage tests, the PCMark 8 Storage benchmark highlights real-world performance differences between storage devices. Fresh Drive Conditioned Drive Drive Comparison For the drive comparison, we will use the performance figures from empty drives here. Sabrent-Rocket-4.0-1TB-ChartComparison-PCMark8-bandwidth Sabrent-Rocket-4.0-1TB-ChartComparison-PCMark8-Score PCMark 10 Storage Benchmark PCMark 10 also features a storage benchmark test now, so it's only fitting that we include this in our reviews too. There are several tests available and I will include both the Full System Drive Benchmark and the Data Drive Benchmark. Fresh Drive Sabrent-Rocket-4.0-1TB-BenchFresh-PCMark10-1 Conditioned Drive Sabrent-Rocket-4.0-1TB-BenchCondi-PCMark10 Drive Comparison For the drive comparison, we will use the performance figures from empty drives here. Pricing and Final Thoughts The Sabrent Rocket 4.0 with 1TB can be yours for just £163.99 or $199.98 at the time of this review. That is the price for the version without a heatsink in the UK while the one with the heatsink costs the same in the US. Final Thoughts I really love PCIe 4.0, especially when it comes to storage as that's one of the few things which can take advantage of the speed possibilities. And the Sabrent Rocket 4.0 truly does that with some kickass speeds. The benchmarks on the previous pages show that without a doubt. Yes, it requires a modern system to deliver that kind of performance, but that's a given. The drive comes with all the features you need it to have and it is built with the latests in controllers and NAND. That also explains why it performs as well as it does. The optional heatsink also makes sure that you won't run into heat issues and thermal throttling in the event that your motherboard doesn't have its own heatsink built-in. It's also great to see that Sabrent bundled Acronis True Image with the drive which adds further to the value. It makes it easy to convert your current system setup to a faster modern PCIe 4.0 setup. Should I Purchase One? If you have a modern PCIe 4.0 powered system or plan to get one shortly, then yes. Get it. The Sabrent Rocket 4.0 is one of the best drives on the market, without a doubt! Pros Latest technology for a Great performanceBeautiful looking designGood package with included Acronis True Image cloning softwareAvailable with and without heatsink Cons None "Get the latest technology and fastest storage, which is affordable, with the Sabrent Rocket 4.0" Sabrent Rocket 4.0 PCIe 4 NVMe SSD Review Thank you, Sabrent, for providing us with this sample.