Sabrent Rocket 500GB PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD Review

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Rocket Control Panel

Sabrent has a tool on its website called Rocket Control Panel.  This will provide information on your SSD, health status, and the ability to update the firmware.

The main screen shows disk info in the left top corner, including the firmware version and serial number.  It displays the features underneath, and ours says TRIM Support Enabled and S.M.A.R.T. Enabled as well as Gen4 PCIe x4.  There is a speed test button, and we’ll get to that in a second.  The disk info button just brings up this information already on the screen. 

There is a wheel of options below, to view contact details, S.M.A.R.T. details, and check for a firmware upgrade.  In the middle is a nice temperature over time graph, it shows the internal temp and the peak temp.  Underneath it also shows the temperature in Celsius and Fahrenheit.  On the right side are buttons that lead to even more options, and finally it shows Disk’s Health in the bottom right corner.

When you click Disk Info it brings up detailed specifications on the SSD.  It shows three states of power on this particular SSD State 0 is maximum of 7.14 Watts, State 1 is maximum of 5.43 Watts and State 2 is maximum of 4.57 Watts.

When you click the Speed Test button, you find settings that you can change to test, including duration, sequential or random, block size, threads, queue depth, and file size.  Unfortunately, there is NO button to actually RUN the speed test.  Instead, it relies on you opening up a command prompt and inputting the specific commands with these options selected to run.  For the settings shown above, we have to enter the commands -w0 -d5 -t1 -o8 -b1m -Sh -s -c1G.  In the above screenshots, you can see where we have entered these commands and ran the speed test.  It still didn’t show the results in the program though, only in the command prompt.  This is just not user-friendly.

There are further tools you can download with Acronis, there’s a Sabrent-tailored version of it you can download with this SSD.  The firmware upgrade checks for new firmware and allows you to upgrade if available.

Acronis True Image for Sabrent

You can download a special Acronis True Image version made for Sabrent drives.  This is a powerful piece of software that compliments the SSD well.  It has a Secure Erase function to erase SSDs without heavy endurance loss and securely erases data.  It has a Disk Clone ability to clone your drives very easily.  It offers free ransomware and illicit crypto mining protection to protect against third-party processes that encrypt your files or try to use your CPU for mining.  It also offers a backup feature.

Installation

Installation went smoothly after we inserted the drive.  Sabrent does not have a specific NVMe driver, it relies on the default NVMe Windows drivers.  In CrystalDiskInfo you can see that the firmware shown is RKT401.2 and the Interface is NVM Express on PCIe 4.0 x4 with the 1.3 protocol.  The drive supports S.M.A.R.T., TRIM, and VolatileWriteCache.

Sabrent Rocket 500GB PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD CrystalDiskInfo
Brent Justicehttps://www.thefpsreview.com
Former managing editor of GPUs at HardOCP for 18 years, Brent Justice has been reviewing computer components since the late 90s, educated in the art and method of the computer hardware review, he brings experience, knowledge, and hands-on testing with a gamer-oriented and hardware enthusiast perspective. You can follow him on Twitter - @Brent_Justice You can sub to his YouTube channel - Justice Gaming https://www.youtube.com/c/JusticeGamingChannel You can check out his computer builds on KIT - @BrentJustice https://kit.co/BrentJustice

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