Just a few weeks ago, Sabrent quietly rolled out the first 4TB-capacity PCIe. 4.0 drive, and now it's following suit with the fastest M.2 SSD in the galaxy, with its new Rocket 4 Plus. In doing so, Sabrent is positioning itself as a legitimate high-end rival to Samsung in the SSD storage sector.
This is another quiet launch, when really it deserves shouting from a mountaintop. But instead of a braggadocios announcement, Sabret erected a product page (via Tom's Hardware) shortly after Samsung did the same for its new 980 Pro series, which boasts blistering sequential read and write speeds of up to 7,000MB/s and 5,000MB/s, respectively.
Sabrent's Rocket 4 Plus is rated to deliver the same 7,000MB/s read speed, but leaves the 980 Pro in the dust with 6,850MB/s writes. The difference is mostly academic for gaming, but if you're copying large files or doing something like heavy-duty video editing, the difference in write performance becomes more meaningful.
Like the 980 Pro, the Rocket 4 Plus is a PCIe. 4.0 SSD, meaning you'll need an AMD X570 or B550 motherboard to take full advantage of the rated speeds. Those are the only two chipsets that support PCIe 4.0 at the moment.
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Sabrent's offering its new SSDs in 2TB, 1TB, and 500GB capacities. Each one pairs triple-level cell (TLC) NAND flash memory chips with a Phison E18 controller. The controller is key—according to Phison, it supports drives up to 8TB in capacity, with max speeds of 7,000MB/s for both reads and writes.
The Rocket 4 Plus series also come with a chunky cooling solution. It's a layered design consisting of an aluminum tray encompassing the M.2 module, which itself sports thermal tape on the top and bottom. On top of that sits an aluminum heatsink, and on top of that is a series of copper heat coils. The cherry on top is a heatspreader.
There's no mention of pricing or a release date yet. As a point of reference, Sabrent's 2TB Rocket (5,000MB/s reads, 4,400MB/s writes) lists for $399.99 on Amazon, while the 1TB model sells for $199.98 and the 500GB model goes for $119.98.
