Sabrent Rocket NVMe PCIe 4.0 1TB SSD Review

By Nathan Kirsch February 21, 2020

Sabrent Delivers PCIe Gen 4.0 Performance At Low Prices

Today we have a real treat for our readers as we’ll be taking a look at the Sabrent Rocket NVMe M.2 2280 form factor SSD that uses the PCIe Gen4.0 x4 interface. This is the best performing SSD that Sabrent has to offer and you are about to find out why Sabrent says this drive delivers extreme performance. The Sabrent Rocket NVMe 4.0 series uses the Phison PS5016-E16 SSD controller paired with Kioxia’s BiCS4 96-layer TLC (triple-level cell) NAND Flash memory. This combination is good for sequential speeds of up to 5,000 MB/s (read) and 4,400 MB/s (write) when run on a slot that uses PCIe Gen4. If you happen to be running on a board with PCIe Gen3 support you’ll be able to reach up to 3400 MB/s (read) and 3000 MB/s (write). Reaching up to 5.0 GB/s for sequential read and 4.4 GB/s for sequential write speeds is impressive and currently only possible if you happen to be running on one of the latest AMD Ryzen platforms.

The Sabrent Rocket 4.0 drive series is available in 500GB, 1TB and 2TB capacities at very competitive prices. The 500GB model runs $119.99 shipped, doubling up to the 1TB drive puts you at $189.99 shipped and finally you have the 2TB drive at $379.99 shipped. These prices are higher than most PCIe Gen 3.0 drives and that is because PCI Gen 4.0 drives do carry a price premium right. This is mainly due to the new controller that they are using and the fact that they are the fastest drive around on paper. The good news for consumers is that Sabrent is using the same Phison reference design for this series that many other drive makers like are also using. For example the Gigabyte AORUS NVMe Gen4 M.2 1TB is based on the same Phison reference design with a heat spreader and runs $256.49 shipped. So, Sabrent is offering basically the same exact drive for over 25 percent less money! If you really wanted a heat spreader, you can get the optional Sabrent M.2 2280 SSD Rocket Heatsink (SB-HTSK) for $22.99 shipped and still save a good amount of cash!

The power and performance numbers depends on the model that you are looking at, so please reference the specifications below for the specifics.

All of the Sabrent Rocket NVMe 4.0 series drives are backed by a 5-year warranty, but you have to register your drive with Sabrent to get that warranty length. If you do not register your drive you’ll end up with a 1-year warranty. You have 90-days to register the Sabrent Rocket drive that you purchase to get the 5-year warranty period. We don’t like it when companies make you jump through additional hoops to get a longer warranty period, but this is likely one of the ways Sabrent helps keep pricing down as we doubt that many remember to register their purchase.

One thing that many might overlook in this chart is the Terabytes Written (TBW) rating at the very bottom. TBW measures how many cumulative writes a drive can reasonably expect to complete over its lifespan before needing replacement.

SB-ROCKET-NVMe4-500 – 850 TBW
SB-ROCKET-NVMe4-1TB – 1800 TBW
SB-ROCKET-NVMe4-2TB – 3600 TBW

Sabrent placed a generous rating for each capacity! The 1,800 TBW for the Rocket NVMe 4.0 1TB model and that comes out to being about 0.99 TB of drive writes per day over the course of five years. Being able to write nearly the drives capacity on a daily basis is more than most consumers would ever come close to doing.

The Sabrent Rocket NVMe 4.0 drive that we’ll be reviewing today is the 1TB model that is sold under part number SB-ROCKET-NVMe4-1TB. This drive can be purchased from Amazon for $189.99 shipped, which comes out to be around $0.19 per GB. Sabrent uses the standard M.2 2280 ‘gum stick’ form factor and the 1TB model is a double-sided drive. Sabrent went with a black PCB for this drive and it doesn’t look bad as it matches the blue on the label. Speaking of the label, it doubles as a heat spreader since it contains a thin piece of conductive metal inside. So, don’t remove it!

There is another label on the back of the drive that shows the model number, capacity and the serial number.

Now would be a good time to point out that Sabrent does offer Acronis True Image cloning software for free to those that need it. This software makes replacing an existing drive really easy as you can use it to clone the old data over to the new drive. This free software that can be downloaded right here. You can also download the Sabrent Rocket Control Panel. The Sabrent Rocket Control Panel is a tool that allows you to review certain aspects of your Sabrent Rocket drive, from checking drives health to upgrading drive firmware if one is available.

In addition to the control panel and cloning software, one can also download Sabrent’s Sector Size Converter. This converter is a small application that gives you a free and easy way to change your drives sector size, which may be necessary under certain data cloning scenarios. Changing your drives sector size will destroy all the data on the drive since the change requires a re-formatting of the SSD. You can choose between either a 512-byte or a 4096-byte sector size. Our Sabrent drive defaults like most consumer drives on the market to Advanced Format 512e.

That all said, let’s take a look at some benchmark numbers on our AMD X570 test platform.