The fastest SSD we have ever tested – Sabrent Rocket PCIe 4 NVMe SSD

So in the past we have done quite a few SSDs but nothing really close to this one. This is the Sabrent rocket NVME PCIe 4 2TB with heatsink. Now that is quite the mouth full, but this is really a little beast. Like I mentioned before we have the 2TB version, so if you are looking at getting a main C drive with enough space for COD MW this is the one to go for. It’s worth mentioning that the Rocket is also backwards compatible with PCIe 3. So if you are still running a PCIe 3 motherboard but planning to upgrade this would still work. 

In the box

Now from the unboxing experience everything shows that you have made a good purchase, as it is packaged very premium as well. With the SSD itself resting inside a metallic case, packaged very safely. So from the moment you get the SSD you have this sense that it was money well spent.

Price

Now pricing for this unit ranges from $170 for the 1 TB and for the 2TB like we have its $380. That is with the heatsink, you can also buy it without the heatsink which is the only option available here in SA from Wootware, but the prices are $160 or R3300 for the 1TB and $370 or R7000 for the 2TB or you can buy the heatsink as an accessory for $23. So if your motherboard does not have an included heat spreader then it might be better to just get the combo. As this heat spreader does a really good job. It is quite a beefy little guy, it consists of the aluminium tray, with a thermal pad, that your SSD sits on top of then on top of your SSD you get another thermal pad, that’s connected to the aluminium heat sink. Going through the heatsink are three copper heat coils and then finally sitting on top of that is another heat spreader.

Temperatures

We pushed the SSD to its max to try and heat this up but the hottest we could get it was 71c. That’s while we ran AS SSD, ATTO benchmarks and did like 10x 113GB copies all at once for a  30 minute period. So the heat spreader really does its job properly.

Benchmarks

Now we mentioned AS SSD and ATTO previously so let’s get into the benchmarks a little bit. Keep in mind speeds may differ on smaller capacity SSDs. Now the rocket performed really well here but it’s to no surprise as all the previous Sabrent products we have done is extremely good.  With sequential tests the Rocket did extremely well, being the best out of all the SSDs so far. Even beating the Corsair MP600. In randoms the rocket also did really well only being beaten once by the Transcend MTE220S, by a very small margin. 

We also ran ATTO and the results were amazing as we saw over 5GBs reads and almost hitting 4Gbs on writes!

Last but we ran Crystal Disk. We ran two different tests. And the Rocket still performed really well. Being our fastest SSD that we have tested to date.

We also did a copy test on a 38GB and a 113GB file. We duplicated these files on the SSD then copied it from the SSD to another external thunderbolt 3 SSD and then back to the rocket again. Now the external SSD we used is the fastest one we have here in the studio, it’s the Sabrent Rocket Thunderbolt 3 SSD, unfortunately the motherboard did not have thunderbolt either so we had to use the USB 3.2 Gen 2 port. So we had a bottleneck on the external SSD. But here we can see more what real life results would be like.

So for the duplicate test it took 26 seconds for the 38GB file and 77 seconds for the 113GB file.

Then to copy from the rocket, the 38GB file took 2 minutes and the 113 GB took 8 minutes and 16 seconds

And finally copying back the 38GB file took 1 minute and the 113GB file took 2 minutes and 45 seconds

So this is honestly a quick and cool little rocket, a great addition for any PC with PCIe 4.0.

Features

Now you also get 2 different types of the sabrent rocket. One being the QLC and the one we have is the TLC. Now the differences between the two are. QLC NAND stores four bits per cell by sensing one of 16 possible charge states, triple-level cell (TLC) NAND only tracks eight. Of course, that’s still a formidable task. But because fewer bits are written to TLC NAND compared to QLC memory, TLC can withstand a higher number of program/erase cycles before its cells start wearing out.

Now in conclusion the added heat spreader is a bit pricey but I think it is worth it, considering that your motherboard doesn’t come with one though. The thing is motherboards included heat spreaders are designed to fit in with the look of the motherboard, and this heat spreader kind of sticks out like a sore thumb to be honest. So functionally it does a great job but aesthetics not so much. Unless it is the look that you want to go for. 

But when it comes to speed this little rocket lives up to its name, This would be really nice to have in some of the up and coming laptops that have PCie 4 as well. You obviously won’t be able to use the heatsink, unless you leave your bottom panel of the laptop of course, but we won’t recommend that. The price is also very attractive compared to some of the other PCIe 4 SSDs on the market. Not that it’s cheaper, it’s roughly the same price and that’s with the heatsink included. So there’s honestly no reason not to go for the rocket and only reasons to rather go for it to be honest. This is a really good buy and one of my easiest recommendations that I have done.