Packaging

The Drive

The drive uses the M.2 2280 form factor, which makes it 22 mm wide and 80 mm long.


While most other M.2 NVMe SSDs transfer data over the PCI-Express 3.0 x4 interface, the Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus connects to the host system using a PCI-Express 4.0 x4 interface, which doubles the theoretical bandwidth.


The heatspreader is made out of copper and fairly thin, but it helps to soak up the heat from the controller to dissipate it over a larger area. Go back to the front pictures, I really like how Sabrent came up with a matte surface design, which gives the product a completely different feel than the gloss we've seen on other drives.


On the PCB, you'll find the controller and eight flash chips; two DRAM cache chips are installed, too.


The PlayStation 5 heatsink comes in a separate package, which includes a basic screwdriver, so you don't need additional tools to open up your PS5 and install the heatsink.


Inside the package, you'll find this aluminium heatsink. It is big, much bigger than the usual M.2 slot heatsink we're used to seeing. The reason is that it is designed specifically for the PS5, where it'll fit perfectly.


This photo from Sabrent illustrates how well it will fit. The PS5 heatsink is actually compatible with all other M.2 SSDs as long as they don't have their own heatsink installed. A thin heatspreader like on the Rocket 4 Plus is fine.

Chip Component Analysis

The Phison PS5018-E18 is Phison's PCI-Express 4.0 controller with eight channels. It is produced on TSMC's 12 nanometer node and uses five Arm Cortex R5 CPU cores. The E18 supports NVMe 1.4, TLC, DDR4 memory, and up to 32 dies.


The eight flash chips are Micron 96-layer 3D TLC NAND. Each chip has a capacity of 256 GB.


Two Hynix DDR4-2666 chips provide 2 GB of fast DRAM storage for the controller to store the mapping tables.