Tom’s Hardware Verdict

The Sabrent Rocket 4 is a pleasant upgrade from the older but still popular Rocket NVMe 4.0. It delivers better performance, power efficiency, and a single-sided design for use in laptops, with the only question being cost.

Pros

• +

  Good all-around performance

• +

  Good sustained performance

• +

  Power-efficient

Cons

• –

  Plenty of competition

• –

  Initially high pricing

Hot on the heels of our

Sabrent Rocket 5 review

, we have the new Sabrent Rocket 4, another new and promising SSD the company has added to its product stack. The Rocket 4, not to be confused with the original

Sabrent Rocket NVMe 4.0

, is a DRAM-less PCIe 4.0 SSD slotted to be a comfortable update to the older drive and as a budget alternative to the

Rocket 4 Plus

. We’ll see how it competes with the

best SSDs

as wella s the

best PS5 SSDs

.

Our 2TB sample comes as a single-sided drive, which makes the Rocket 4 promising for laptops and alternatively as a cooler running solution for the PS5. This puts it up against drives like the

Lexar NM790

and

Crucial T500

, which also push the limits of the 4.0 interface but with different compromises made.

The original Rocket NVMe 4.0 utilizes the DRAM-equipped

Phison E16

controller, which formed the basis of the first wave of PCIe 4.0 drives way back when AMD’s

X570 chipset

launched in 2019 (though the drives didn’t officially launch until 2020). In some respects the E16 would later be replaced by the DRAM-less Phison E21T, although Sabrent’s drives using that controller are only in the M.2 2230 form factor so far — the

Rocket 2230

and

Rocket Q4 2230

— with 2242 coming soon. Newer flash means the 4.0 interface can be saturated, though, and that’s where the Phison E27T on the new Rocket 4 comes into play.

If you want maximum desktop performance, the Sabrent Rocket 5 may be the way to go. There’s also the Rocket 4 Plus and its DirectStorage-optimized sibling, the

Rocket 4 Plus-G

. However, it’s now possible to get that same level of performance in a DRAM-less solution that’s less expensive and more efficient. If those are important factors for you, and that is often the case with laptops that have limited cooling opportunities and are constrained by battery life, then the new Rocket 4 should be right up your alley.

The Sabrent Rocket 4 is available at

1TB for $99.99

and

2TB for $199.99

, with 4TB being a future possibility. Those prices are higher than similar, competing products such as the

Inland TN470

and the

Corsair MP600 Elite

, but this is a new product and prices are subject to change. SSD prices have been climbing and are

expected to climb more

, so comparison shopping has become more challenging.

The Rocket 4 can reach up to 7,400 / 6,400 MB/s for sequential reads and writes, effectively the maximum possible out of the PCIe 4.0 interface. Random read and write IOPS reach up to 1000K / 900K. This would have been unthinkable for a DRAM-less SSD in years past. The drive has the typical 5-year warranty with registration, and up to 600TB of writes per TB capacity. We recommend looking at the warranty period when picking a drive, with write endurance being less meaningful as you’re unlikely to do that many writes.

We removed the copper label to show the controller and two NAND packages, with DRAM being absent. This is the normal configuration for the Phison E27T, technically allowing up to 4TB in a single-sided drive. There’s physical space to spare, so this same configuration could work in a smaller form factor, and more packages could be added — to the back, if necessary — to reach even higher capacities. For now, 2TB is the maximum, which is sufficient as that is the sweet spot for SSDs at this time.

We discussed the Phison E27T SSD controller thoroughly in our

Corsair MP600 Elite review

, but as a refresher, this is a higher-end budget controller designed to compete with the Maxio MAP1602 and SMI SM2268XT. The MAP1602 came first and is usually paired with YMTC’s 232-Layer TLC flash, for example on drives like the

Addlink A93

, with surprisingly good performance and power efficiency. We haven’t reviewed the SM2268XT yet, just the SM2269XT with the

Lexar Play SSD

, but we’ve heard good things. The E27T also competes with the E25 on the

Crucial T500

, but that controller does have DRAM.

The NAND flash is Kioxia’s 162-Layer TLC, or BiCS6, which breaks away from older BiCS generations with a much more efficient design. It also allows for 1Tb dies for higher capacity. This makes it a pretty good pick for a drive like this, perhaps having better availability still than Micron’s 232-Layer flash. SK hynix’s V7 176-Layer flash isn’t fast enough to get the most out of the PCIe 4.0 interface with a four-channel controller like the E27T.