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.


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


This copper heatspreader foil comes preinstalled on the Rocket 4 Plus.


Sabrent also sent their "Sabrent Rocket NVMe Heatsink" with the Rocket 4 Plus sample; it's an additional purchase for $25.


The heatsink is a great little cooling solution that has sufficient mass to soak up quite some heat. It's also very sturdy and uses screws to hold the drive together firmly. You may also use this cooler on other M.2 drives, from any vendor.

Please note that the copper "heatpipes" aren't heatpipes that are filled with a low-pressure liquid for better heat transfer, but solid copper rods, which of course still contribute to heat transfer.

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. Sabrent has rebranded the controller with their own markings.


The eight flash chips are Micron 176-layer 3D TLC NAND. Each chip has a capacity of 512 GB.


Two Hynix DDR4-3200 chips provide 2 GB of fast DRAM storage for the controller to store the mapping tables.