Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus 1TB and 2TB Review
Introduction and Technical Specifications
Published: 29th December 2020 | Source: Sabrent | Price: £199 and £466 |
Introduction
There are many benefits to the modern modular way of building hardware. As we've often said in our motherboard reviews having everything pretty much on the chipset means that most motherboards perform very similarly, allowing the consumer to choose the brand or feature set that best fits their budget/needs. Similarly the automatic boost overclocking on GPUs means that the days of having to pay through the nose for a factory overclock are passed. Even if peripherals putting Cherry switches in everything guarantees a consistent feel.
In the storage drive world the combination of a quality controller and NAND chips lets many manufacturers enter the storage market and they can utilise their flexible company to keep their product range at the forefront of performance. The larger any business is the more hidebound it becomes. Sabrent definitely don't fall into this category and barely a month goes by without a new product launch from them that takes the cutting edge controller and NAND performance from the newest chips and produces a drive which promises to be everything a drive can be.
Today it's the newest iteration of their Rocket series in the form of the Rocket 4 Plus. A PCIe 4.0 NVMe M.2 drive pairing in three capacities, two of which we've got in for testing today, so let's see how they perform and if they can get close to the famed Samsung 980.
Technical Specifications
Although there is a 500GB model we're focussing upon the larger of the two Rocket 4 Plus drives. Partly because higher capacity always brings higher speeds on solid state drives, but also because the size of modern titles means that 500GB just isn't big enough for anything useful. If you installed Dirt 2.0, Hitman 2 and Call of Duty Cold War you'd pretty much have filled it up with three games. Besides a tiny increase in power draw on the larger drive, both are identical with 3D BiCS4 NAND powered by the Phison PS5016-E16 controller. Phison are rapidly - heh - making a name for themselves in the speed stakes so we can't wait to see how the new Sabrent Rocket performs.
Most Recent Comments
Synthetic workloads might have the "downside" of not being "Real World use", whatever the hell that is, but they do have the upside of being much more consistent.
Also, one reviewer's work is only valid against their own testing. As long as you are comparing the Tiniest One with his own work, you have a valid comparison. Not so much when compared with others who might have different controls and different variables.Quote
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Originally Posted by Deadtroopers
The advice all reviewers give is don't go off just one or two reviews, use half a dozen at least. There will always be outliers and individual reviewers have different methodologies and different biases.
Synthetic workloads might have the "downside" of not being "Real World use", whatever the hell that is, but they do have the upside of being much more consistent. Also, one reviewer's work is only valid against their own testing. As long as you are comparing the Tiniest One with his own work, you have a valid comparison. Not so much when compared with others who might have different controls and different variables. |
yeah i know. and i don´t want to badmouth the 980 pro.
i have 4 of them and santa just brought me 2 more.
i bought them because compared to the 970 pro they offer a good value (209 euro for 1TB here).
https://i.imgur.com/AvMK84S.jpg
but the thing is, to have a real insight into how a SSD performs you need more than synthetic benchmarks.
| Synthetic workloads might have the "downside" of not being "Real World use", whatever the hell that is, |
let say your a photographer that fills up the SSD quite often when he returns from a shooting.
in a way that the SLC cache runs out. how well perfoms the SSD then?
there are quite some differences how badly SSD models will behave.
how are actual application load times?
for most gamers the great looking numbers of PCI 4.0 SSDs yield next to nothing (on a PC) in real world usage.
how many gamers now that... not many from my experience.
they look at 3500 vs 7000 MB/s and think it will be twice as fast.
some would actually be better of to buy a bigger and slower SSD than a smaller and faster SSD.
i could give a few more examples but i think it has become clear what i mean.
running a few benchmarks is something everyone does.
my grandma can do it.
if you want to give your readers (as a youtuber/reviewer) more "value" then you need to dig a bit deeper.
you don´t judge a car only by how it fares on perfectly prepared racetrack.
and while the 980 pro is sure a nice SSD... some of the changes they made have negative effect on performance. if/how you are affected is a question of your usage... but you need to know about it first.Quote
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maybe that is why you praised the 980 pro while other reviewers had a more critical view on it.
some of the review sites i trust came to the conclusion that the 970 pro had some advantages in real life situations over the 980 pro.
while the 980 pro sure shows some impressive peak numbers.
the 970 pro actually behaved better in some real life situations.
maybe the test are dated for PCI 4.0 devices but in anandtechs heavy and light storage bench the 970 pro beat the 980 pro a few times.
anyway... crystal disk mark and co. only give a very limited insight on how a SSD actually performs.Quote