Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus

A superfast, 2TB second-generation PCIe 4.0 drive that comes in at a decent price? Sign me up, says Alan Dexter.

- Alan Dexter

SPECS

Model: SB-RKT4P-2TB

Capacity: 2,000GB

Interface: PCIe Gen4 x4

Controller: Phison PS5018-E18

NAND: Micron B27 96-later TLC

Rated seq. read: 7,100MB/s

Rated seq. write: 6,600MB/s

Endurance: 1,400TBW

Warranty: Five years

Meet the first drive to use the new Phison E18 controller. This is the followup to the immensely popular Phison E16 controller found in basically every first-generation PCIe 4.0 drive. No, seriously, that’s the controller you’ll find in everything from the CORSAIR MP600, to the GIGABYTE AORUS, to the Addlink S90, in addition to plenty of Sabrent’s drives. And for good reason: it topped out at just over 5,000MB/s for reads, and 4,400MB/s writes, while the best PCIe 3.0 drives managed reads of 3,500MB/s and writes of just 2,500MB/s.

This new Phison E18 controller ups the ante significantly, offering sequential throughput of up to 7,100MB/s reads and 6,600MB/s writes. The theoretical limits of the interface are 8GB/s for both, so those figures aren’t far off how fast you can expect PCIe 4.0 to ever go. It’s incredibly fast, basically, and on paper at least the fastest drive to be released so far.