Introduction
Sabrent has become a well-known name for quality SSDs. It provides plenty of SSD options that are built well, reliable, and using the latest technologies. Browsing Sabrent’s internal SSDs webpage we find PCIe Gen3 and Gen4 drives, in various capacities, and even form factor sizes.
We will be reviewing the Sabrent 500GB Rocket NVMe PCIe 4.0 M.2 2280 Internal SSD Extreme Performance Solid State Drive (SB-ROCKET-NVMe4-500) today. That’s quite a long name, according to the website. Basically, this is a PCIe Gen4 NVMe SSD that is 500GB in capacity. We are reviewing the bare drive, sans Sabrent heatsink. The current price on Sabrent’s website is $119.99 for this drive, though it can be found even cheaper on Amazon at just $89.98 in 2021.
Sabrent has different capacities of the Rocket 4.0 SSD model. Beyond the 500GB capacity, there is also a 1TB and 2TB capacity drive. All three capacity drives also have optional Sabrent heatsinks that can be sold in the package, or you can buy just the bare drive. All three capacity drives have the same rated max sequential read speed but do vary in sequential write performance, as well as random read and write performance. The 1TB and 2TB models are matched in speeds, but the 500GB version is rated at slower read and write random performance.
Sabrent Rocket 500GB Gen4 PCIe NVMe SSD
The 500GB Sabrent Rocket 4.0 SSD is an NVMe M.2 PCI-Express 4.0 (PCIe Gen4x4) TLC SSD that is NVMe 1.3 compliant. The SKU is SB-ROCKET-NVMe4-500 for this drive. It is in the M.2 2280 form factor. It is rated at 5000MB/s max sequential read, and 2500MB/s max sequential write. IOPS is rated at 400K random 4KQD32 read, and 500K random 4KQD32 write.
The 500GB Rocket NVMe PCIe 4.0 M.2 2280 SSD supports power management features APST/ASPM/L1.2. It supports S.M.A.R.T. and TRIM commands, as well as ONFi 2.3, ONFi 3.0, ONFi 3.2, and ONFi 4.0 interface. It has advanced wear-leveling, bad block management, error correction code, and overprovision support. The firmware is also upgradeable.
The SSD measures 80mm length, 22m width, and 3.7mm height. It runs at 3.3V and power consumption is rated at up to 6.2W read, and 4.6W write. The operating temperature is up to 70c before throttling. It has an MTBF of 1,700,000. Endurance is rated at 850 TBW. Sabrent offers a 5-year warranty with registration.
Sabrent makes a very interesting statement on its website pertaining to this SSD. It states very specifically: “When installing any NVMe PCIe 4.0 SSD directly onto a PCIe Gen4 Motherboard a Heatsink is required to dissipate the heat generated by the drives extreme speed levels to avoid thermal throttling and maximize performance.”
You can buy this drive packaged with a Sabrent heatsink. This will be important if your motherboard does not have an M.2 heatsink. But even if it does, the Sabrent heatsink may be superior, as it actually cools both sides of the SSD. The heatsink encompasses the entire SSD, something that motherboard M.2 heatsinks do not do. However, you can also just purchase this SSD without the Sabrent heatsink, as we have. In that case, you have no choice but to use your motherboard’s M.2 heatsink spreader, and we suggest you do because apparently, Sabrent says you need to.
Pictures and Components
NAND flash consists of Toshiba’s BiCS4 96-layer TLC NAND flash memory. The controller onboard is a Phison PS5016-E16 controller. This is a popular controller on this generation of SSDs, it’s a 28nm 8 channel Gen4x4 controller supporting NVMe 1.3. It’s based on a 32-bit ARM Cortex R5 CoXProcessor technology. It supports LDPC ECC and AES 256-bit.
This SSD does have a DDR4 DRAM cache on board. It’s a single chip of SK Hynix DDR4 that reads H5AN4G8NBJR-UHC which is a 4Gb chip, so 512MB on this particular SSD. This is DDR4-2400.
