Just when Samsung had unveiled its 980 Pro NVMe SSDs a few days ago, Sabrent stole their thunder by announcing a faster PCIe 4.0 SSD. The new Rocket 4 Plus drive is touted to be the fastest PCIe 4.0 in the market, for the time being.
Sabrent’s new drives can deliver read speeds up to 7000 MB/s, which is also possible by the Samsung 980 Pro. The big deal here is that the write speeds of the Rocket 4 Plus easily beats Samsung’s best drive. It has a write speed of 6850 MB/s, as compared to the 5000 MB/s capability of the Samsung 980 Pro SSDs. The new drives are based on TLC NAND chips, which is also the case for the Samsung 980 Pro. However, Sabrent uses the all-new Phison 18 controller on the Rocket 4 Plus.
While Samsung used nickel coating atop its controller chip and heat spreading label to cool the 980 Pro, Sabrent chose to go the aggressive route by using a very large heat sink for the Rocket 4 Plus NVMe SSD. The new heat sink is made up of a combination of aluminum and copper. The copper portion is responsible to absorb the drive’s heat and spread the heat evenly through the aluminum surface located on top of the heat sink. This allows the Rocket 4 Plus to perform at full speeds without any hiccups due to overheating. It’s pretty clear that this drive is meant for desktop PCs. However, we do hope that the heatsink is at least removable or any form of an option to buy the drive without the heat sink, letting users install on tight spaces like laptops or smaller motherboards.
Sabrent has still yet to unveil more information regarding the new Rocket 4 Plus series. For instance, there is no mention of the endurance of the new drives. We should remind you that the Samsung 980 Pro NVMe SSDs have an endurance rating at 600 TBW, which is quite disappointing. It should also be noted that Samsung had a different read/write speed specifications and endurance for the three different storage models of the 980 Pro series. Sabrent does mention on the product page that the 7000 MB/s read and 6850 MB/s write speeds were achieved using the 2TB model. Speaking of which, Sabrent will be releasing the Rocket 4 Plus NVMe PCIe 4.0 SSD in 500GB, 1TB, and 2TB SSDs. There is no sign of a 4TB model for this series. However, we wouldn’t be surprised if Sabrent would release a 4TB Rocket 4 Plus at a later time.
There are still some details that are yet to be unveiled and the company has not yet announced the official price of the new drives. It’s good to see that brands have finally started to embrace PCIe 4.0 based NVMe drives and release fast drives for the masses.