The Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus is based on the highly popular Phison E18 controller, which is among the fastest available and has the Rocket 4 Plus beat out solid-state drives with controllers from WD and Samsung. Phison's PS5018-E18 controller is a high-end eight-channel model based on a multi-core ARM design fabricated at TSMC using 12 nanometer technology. This controller seems to be all the rage these days—we've encountered it in most of our recent SSD reviews. Other important components of the drive are 96-layer 3D TLC flash from Micron and 2 GB of fast DDR4-2666 DRAM cache, which helps achieve the best performance during random write activity. While the 96-layer TLC flash is slowly getting replaced by the slightly more modern 176-layer NAND from Micron, which offers slightly higher performance in some cases, the differences aren't that big. The unique selling point of the drive is support for the PCI-Express 4.0 interface, which has become mainstream thanks to AMD's Ryzen processors. Intel has added support for PCIe 4.0 since Rocket Lake, which should help the push for PCIe 4.0 SSDs. Physically, the Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus seems identical to the Phison E18 reference design, which also makes it identical to the Corsair MP600 Pro and Addlink S95.

Synthetic performance numbers of the Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus are really good; all results are near the top of our charts. An important result is that sequential writes are faster than any other SSD in our test group. Sequential reads are super high, too, 5.57 GB/s, just 30 MB/s behind the top score. Random IO results are excellent as well, higher than the major competitors WD Black SN850 and Samsung 980 Pro, albeit only by a small margin. No doubt a lot of optimization went into getting these scores high enough to beat the other drives. That's why our real-life testing is so important—it runs actual applications, which is much harder to optimize for. Our real-life testing is also performed with 80% of the drive filled, which is a more realistic scenario and limits the drive in the way it uses its pseudo-SLC cache.

In our real-life test suite, the Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus achieves impressive results, too. It is faster than the Gammix S70 Blade and Corsair MP600 Pro. Only the Kingston KC3000 and Samsung 980 Pro are 1% faster, and the WD Black SN850 is 2% faster. Compared to the fastest PCI-Express 3.0 drives, the difference is around 2–5%; of course, more depending on the workload. More value-oriented PCIe 3.0 drives are 15% slower, and the aging SATA drives are around 25% slower, SATA QLC even 40–50%.

As mentioned before, the pseudo-SLC cache size of the Rocket 4 Plus is 200 GB, which is within the "typical" range by today's standards. Filling the whole drive completes at 1.6 GB/s, a very good result, faster than all other drives except for the Samsung 980 Pro and Kingston KC3000. We can see a difference between the 176-layer TLC flash on the Kingston drive and 96-layer flash on the Rocket 4 Plus in this review. The newer flash is around 300 MB/s faster on average, not a huge difference, but worth mentioning. Of course, momentarily stopping the write activity will have the SLC cache free up capacity immediately, so full write rates are available as soon as you give the drive a moment to settle down.

Sabrent includes a preinstalled copper heatspreader that does a decent job cooling the drive. While it can't eliminate throttling completely, it can delay it enough to make it very rare. In our worst case thermal stress test, throttling happened after 2 minutes of non-stop incoming writes—over 500 GB written in such a short time. What I don't like is that the thermal throttling is very aggressive. Performance will almost stop until the drive has cooled down a bit, and then resume at full speed. Other drives use more gradual throttling algorithms that try to make the performance loss less noticeable.

In this review, I also looked at the Sabrent PlayStation 5 heatsink, which is shaped to exactly fit the opening on the PlayStation 5. While we didn't test specifically on the PS5, we hooked the heatsink up to the M.2 SSD in our thermal bench to get an apples-to-apples comparison. With the heatsink installed, temperatures dropped a lot, and there was no more thermal throttling. This is an excellent result. When installed in the PS5, which does have a little bit of airflow in that area, there will be no thermal throttling. In terms of performance, the Rocket 4 Plus will perform similarly to the integrated SSD of the PS5. What I really like is that the heatsink is universal—it will fit any other M.2 NVMe SSD in the PS5, so you can continue using it if you switch to another SSD down the road.

At $20, the PlayStation 5 heatsink is not unreasonably priced, I'd say. However it is not sold at bargain prices, either. What makes all the difference is that it is a solid chunky metal design with enough mass to soak up incoming heat. Definitely a recommended option if you feel your PS5 SSD might overheat, though that is quite unlikely.

Priced at $310 for the tested 2 TB version, the Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus is positioned aggressively against other PCI-Express 4.0 SSDs. All the major competitors are more expensive: Samsung 980 Pro ($330), WD Black SN850 ($320), and Corsair MP600 Pro ($320). The Kingston KC3000 is MUCH more expensive at $460, definitely not worth it. The only exception is the ADATA Gammix S70 Blade currently sold at a discounted price of $270, a very tempting offer. All these prices are in flux, though, and change from time to time, and vary by region. $310 for a 2 TB SSD is also a lot of money considering you can find good PCIe 3.0 drives for around $50 less; there's the HP EX950 ($250), Hynix Gold P31 ($250), or Kingston KC2500 ($280). If you only care about price/performance and are happy to sacrifice some performance for better pricing, entry-level value M.2 NVMe SSDs could be an option as those retail at around $200 and below and are not that much slower.