Update on July 13, 2021: We have updated this article with a new test for 500GB Sabrent Rocket NVMe 4.0 M.2 SSD on page 2.
Original comment posted on April 2, 2020:
Sabrent is very popular now, and for good reason. So far, the company’s Rocket NVMe 4.0 uses the same ingredients as other Gen4 SSDs on the market. This means it packs Kioxia’s latest 3D TLC NAND and is driven by Phison’s PS5016-E16 NVME SSD controller. Moreover, although it is quite expensive per GB, Sabrent’s Rocket NVMe 4.0 is priced far lower than most high-end competitors, making it one of the best SSD-buck Gen4 drives to date.
Please note that if you do not register the SSD within 90 days of purchase, Sabrent’s warranty policy will only cover Rocket NVMe 4.0 for up to 1 year. However, if you do this, you will get a longer 5-year warranty. This is a small fee to pay the lower price at checkout.
specification
| Sabrent Rocket NVMe 4.0 500GB | Sabrent Rocket NVMe 4.0 1TB | Sabrent Rocket NVMe 4.0 2TB | |
|---|---|---|---|
| price | 89.99 USD | 159.99 USD | USD 399.99 |
| Capacity (user/raw) | 500GB / 512GB | 1000GB / 1024GB | 2000GB / 2048GB |
| Constitutive factors | M.2 2280 | M.2 2280 | M.2 2280 |
| Interface Protocol | PCIe 4.0 x4 / NVMe 1.3 | PCIe 4.0 x4 / NVMe 1.3 | PCIe 4.0 x4 / NVMe 1.3 |
| Controller | Zipline E16 | Zipline E16 | Zipline E16 |
| Dynamic random access memory | DDR4 | DDR4 | DDR4 |
| memory | KIOXIA 96L Thin Layer Chromatography | KIOXIA 96L Thin Layer Chromatography | KIOXIA 96L Thin Layer Chromatography |
| Sequential reading | 5,000 MBps | 5,000 MBps | 5,000 MBps |
| Sequential write | 2,500 MBps | 4,400 MBps | 4,400 MBps |
| Random read | 400,000 IOPS | 750,000 IOPS | 750,000 IOPS |
| Random write | 550,000 IOPS | 750,000 IOPS | 750,000 IOPS |
| Safety | not applicable | not applicable | not applicable |
| Endurance (TBW) | 850 TB | 1,800 TB | 3,600 TB |
| Part Number | SB-Rocket-NVMe4-500 | SB-Rocket-NVMe4-1TB | SB-Rocket-NVMe4-2TB |
| Warranty | 5 years (including registration); 1 year (not including) | 5 years (including registration); 1 year (not including) | 5 years (including registration); 1 year (not including) |
Although you must manually register Sabrent’s Rocket NVMe 4.0 to get the full warranty, you don’t have to worry about the durability of the equipment. With first-class durability ratings, our samples can withstand up to 3,600 TB of write during the warranty period.
It adopts the M.2 2280 form factor and provides three capacities: 500GB, 1TB and 2TB. In terms of price, the drive is hard to beat in its niche market. It weakens most other Gen4 SSDs. The 1TB and 2TB capacities have rated continuous speeds of up to 5/4.4 GBps and up to 750,000 IOPS, and the smaller 500GB model has a peak write speed of 2.5 GBps, while the peak random performance is lower.
Software and accessories
Sabrent’s Rocket NVMe 4.0 is supported by some software. You can get an OEM copy of Acronis True Image for free. If you encounter any problems during cloning due to the sector size of the device, you can use Sabrent’s Sector Size Converter (SSC), which allows you to change between 4K and 512e sector size, so that in this case Achieve compatibility. In addition, Sabrent provides a control panel application, an SSD toolbox, which you can use to monitor the device and upgrade the firmware when an update is released.
Take a closer look
We must praise Sabrent’s black PCB and very attractive label design. The copper tag looks good and helps with cooling, but on our 2TB sample, it may not be enough to prevent throttling under heavy loads. We will discuss this more later.
The core of SSD is Phison PS5016-E16 PCIe 4.0 x4 NVMe 1.3 SSD controller. Based on the 28nm process node, using dual Cortex R5 CPU cores and dual coprocessors (called CoXProcessor 2.0), the overall design is similar to Phison’s E12. The main difference between the two is not only the PCIe Gen4 PHY, but also the 4th generation LDPC ECC engine updated by Phison. It uses the DRAM cache architecture to maintain strong performance under heavy workloads. Our 2TB sample has two 1GB SK Hynix chips for performing FTL table mapping tasks.
It also supports thermal monitoring, TRIM and Format NVMe commands to securely erase data. In addition, it also has end-to-end data protection to ensure data security and power management support to improve efficiency.
In addition, the device’s Kioxia’s BiCS4 96L TLC, which means that our Rocket NVMe 4.0 sample uses 32 512Gbit NAND dies, distributed in four NAND packages on the PCB. And the drive sets 9% of NAND as over-provisioned space to optimize garbage collection.
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