Overall and Final Verdict
Sabrent has been great at offering a wide selection of options, not just when it comes to capacities but also with drive variations for different workloads. The Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus is their third PCIe Gen 4.0 drive and in some ways, it has improved on some of the downsides of the Rocket Q4 that I previously took a look at. Especially when it comes to pure sequential performance. Its sequential read transfer speeds were 1500 MB/s faster than the Rocket Q4, its sequential write performance wasn’t quite as fast as the read but were still a big improvement over the Rocket Q4 as well. That sequential performance also translated to solid real-world performance in our file transfer tests as well, especially with large files like the movie files and to a lesser extent the photo file transfers as well.
The Rocket 4 Plus did well in my queue depth testing on the write side of things but on the read queue depth tests fell off after a queue depth of 32. It also struggled on the write performance in high queue depth IOPS testing. Those issues hurt the drive's performance in synthetic tests like Passmark but in more real-world focused tests like PCMark 10, it did well.
Like with other Sabrent drives, the Rocket 4 Plus has a good selection of capacity options available now that they have a 4TB option available. They don’t have small capacity options, but for a total system drive you can get in the 1TB option, I tested here, 2TB, and then 4TB. The 1TB option tested here has an MSRP of $199 which has it competing with the WD Black SN850 and Seagate’s Firecuda 520. It isn’t an entry-level option for a PCIe 4.0 drive at this size, the Rocket Q4 and the normal Rocket PCIe 4.0 have that covered down in the $139/$149 range. I haven’t had the chance to test the SN850 yet, but it does have slightly higher promised sequential numbers which could make the Rocket 4 Plus a touch overpriced but it does compare well against other drives in this price range like the Firecuda 520.
Live Pricing: HERE
