Introduction

Sabrent is an American hardware manufacturer that was founded in 1998. Their product ranges include external drive enclosures, cables, chargers, card readers, USB hubs, and similar peripherals. In the last few years, they've made a name for themselves in the SSD market by offering highly cost effective solid-state drives with good performance.

They are particularly well-known for offering QLC drives with good performance at very reasonable pricing, like the Sabrent Rocket Q.



In today's review, we'll take a look at a TLC drive, though. The Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus is their latest release and built around Phison's new E18 controller paired with 96-layer 3D TLC NAND flash from Micron. This is the previous-generation B27B flash—the latest is 176-layer B47R, which is a little bit faster. As we will see throughout this review, differences are not huge. To connect with the rest of the system, the fast PCI-Express 4.0 interface is used. Also included is 2 GB of DRAM cache for those random writes.

The Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus comes in capacities of 500 GB ($90), 1 TB ($160), 2 TB ($310), and 4 TB ($750). Endurance for these models is set to 350 TBW, 700 TBW, 1400 TBW, and 3000 TBW respectively. Sabrent includes a five-year warranty with the Rocket 4 Plus.

In this review, we're also covering the Sabrent PlayStation 5 Heatsink, which has model number SB-PSHS. It's a custom design heatsink shaped specifically to fit into the M.2 slot of the PS5 for the best-possible cooling. It retails for $25.

Packaging

The Drive

The drive uses the M.2 2280 form factor, which makes it 22 mm wide and 80 mm long.


While most other M.2 NVMe SSDs transfer data over the PCI-Express 3.0 x4 interface, the Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus connects to the host system using a PCI-Express 4.0 x4 interface, which doubles the theoretical bandwidth.


The heatspreader is made out of copper and fairly thin, but it helps to soak up the heat from the controller to dissipate it over a larger area. Go back to the front pictures, I really like how Sabrent came up with a matte surface design, which gives the product a completely different feel than the gloss we've seen on other drives.


On the PCB, you'll find the controller and eight flash chips; two DRAM cache chips are installed, too.


The PlayStation 5 heatsink comes in a separate package, which includes a basic screwdriver, so you don't need additional tools to open up your PS5 and install the heatsink.


Inside the package, you'll find this aluminium heatsink. It is big, much bigger than the usual M.2 slot heatsink we're used to seeing. The reason is that it is designed specifically for the PS5, where it'll fit perfectly.


This photo from Sabrent illustrates how well it will fit. The PS5 heatsink is actually compatible with all other M.2 SSDs as long as they don't have their own heatsink installed. A thin heatspreader like on the Rocket 4 Plus is fine.

Chip Component Analysis

The Phison PS5018-E18 is Phison's PCI-Express 4.0 controller with eight channels. It is produced on TSMC's 12 nanometer node and uses five Arm Cortex R5 CPU cores. The E18 supports NVMe 1.4, TLC, DDR4 memory, and up to 32 dies.


The eight flash chips are Micron 96-layer 3D TLC NAND. Each chip has a capacity of 256 GB.


Two Hynix DDR4-2666 chips provide 2 GB of fast DRAM storage for the controller to store the mapping tables.

Test Setup