Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus 4TB Review

Conclusion

We know we’re already getting people commenting that the tests we perform are synthetic in nature and not truly reflective of real world usage as when you’re loading games there isn’t much to choose between a PCIe 4.0 drive and a PCIe 3.0 one. Our response to that is, of course not. Games spend so long loading lenthy videos showing off the use of RenderTree or whomever made it that the drive is largely idle. Similarly loading into the game is largely dependant upon your memory speed, or CPU speed, or any number of underlying factors. What we want to do is test the drives at their peak abilities so that in those scenarios where the drive does make a difference you can see how much of a difference it makes. Theoretically a PCIe 4.0 drive could load all of RDR2 into memory in 16 seconds, assuming you had 128GB of RAM on board. Rather than do that and then have massive caveats, we stick to the generalisation that is synthetic tests.

Ahem.

Right, back to the Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus. When we tested the 1TB and 2TB models of the Phison E18 equipped Sabrent we found it to be a blazing performer usually only bettered by the Samsung 980, but here in 4TB form it follows the tried and tested rule of SSDs that the larger your capacity the better your performance will be. It’s the smaller drives but more so, to the point that in the majority of our write speed tests the 4TB Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus ended up being the fastest we’ve yet seen.

There are only two small things to be aware of, and both of them fall under the category of extreme usage. 99.9% of people will never thrash their drives as hard as we do when we’re doing our cache tests, but if you do happen to be rendering a 90 minute movie in uncompressed 4K then it’s worth noting that the Sabrent speed drop off is significant one you reach the limits of its capacity in a single write, and also that doing so does push the temperature up to just over 80°C. Be in no doubt that in the real world you’ll never see speeds that slow nor temperatures that high, but it would be remiss of us not to mention that it’s theoretically possible.

Sabrent continue to wow us with high performance drives that don’t break the bank, and the newest, largest, addition to the Rocket 4 Plus range shows why they have found themselves in the thick of the action on high end desktops. If you have a PCI Express 4.0 capable system then you could do much worse than fill it with the Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus 4TB and it wins our OC3D Gamers Choice Award.

  

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