Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus

Soldato
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When are these going to be available?
Was all set on getting a Rocket 4 but may as well wait a little for the extra speed, I don't upgrade drives often. Still using my 256Gb 850 Pro SSD but im starting to run out of space.
 

~cw

~cw

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I would be cautious about the Sabrents, I've noted some reviews from customers which mentioned their drives upping and dying after a few months. I so very nearly bought the PCIe v3 Sabrent but ended up backing down, had a gut feeling I'd be dealing with data loss down the line. The Samsung 970 Evo+ I eventually bought benchmarked just about as well, good sustained performance under load too. In real world tests it's proven its mettle on my Z390 board. I still have an 870 Evo (SATA) in my old PC which is trucking at 97% health and about 10 TB written since about 2011/2012.
 
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Apparently saberent rocket 4 plus came out in US yesterday, all the links from tech sites don't work though. But official launch was yesterday so hopefully be available here soon.
 
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I was all set to buy the wd sn850 ... then I heard about this one. Like you I dont upgrade my OS drive that often and building a new system atm ... Why not go with the WD? I know its slightly slower on writes but got some great reviews.
 
Soldato
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Any advice on software to come my current drive? Guessing I can just clone it then switch which drive it boots from.
 
Soldato
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I would be cautious about the Sabrents, I've noted some reviews from customers which mentioned their drives upping and dying after a few months. I so very nearly bought the PCIe v3 Sabrent but ended up backing down, had a gut feeling I'd be dealing with data loss down the line. The Samsung 970 Evo+ I eventually bought benchmarked just about as well, good sustained performance under load too. In real world tests it's proven its mettle on my Z390 board. I still have an 870 Evo (SATA) in my old PC which is trucking at 97% health and about 10 TB written since about 2011/2012.
I have to say that the only data loss from any SSD was from a Samsung 840 EVO. So brands and reviews aren't all they're cracked up to be.

I have a Sabrent NVME SSD in a laptop which hasn't even skipped a beat, although it doesn't see as much as the Samsung 970 EVO Plus in my current desktop, which sees above average use with virtual machines and MSMG's ToolKit to edit Windows 10 ISO images.

If I had to choose a new SSD for my Samsung and Sabrent would be up there as my top choices. The only thing that would put me off Sabrent is the fact they aren't well as established as Samsung are in the SSD world and I haven't had the drive in my laptop long enough to says whether or not it's reliable.
 

~cw

~cw

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I have to say that the only data loss from any SSD was from a Samsung 840 EVO. So brands and reviews aren't all they're cracked up to be.

I have a Sabrent NVME SSD in a laptop which hasn't even skipped a beat, although it doesn't see as much as the Samsung 970 EVO Plus in my current desktop, which sees above average use with virtual machines and MSMG's ToolKit to edit Windows 10 ISO images.

If I had to choose a new SSD for my Samsung and Sabrent would be up there as my top choices. The only thing that would put me off Sabrent is the fact they aren't well as established as Samsung are in the SSD world and I haven't had the drive in my laptop long enough to says whether or not it's reliable.

True, no manufacturer is perfect. At the moment I have greater faith in Samsung's verticals than I do Sabrent's (suspected!) MyDigitalSSD BPX Pro relabelling, despite MDSSD being an apparently reputable brand I'd never heard of until I did some digging. I've used other Sabrent bits and pieces for years and been generally happy with them, but their entry into SSD was unexpected. I'm not sure they're adequate reliability for me yet.

The "critical" reviews on Amazon make for interesting reading, https://www.amazon.co.uk/Sabrent-Ro...viewopt_sr?filterByStar=critical&pageNumber=1

Seems heat death and severe throttling are the main detractions, along with somewhat unpredictable board compatibility according to reviews I've read (not just Amazon). Their warranty process is also not great, I have similar experiences of that with other Sabrent stuff. https://www.ryadel.com/en/sabrent-ssd-review-rocket-nvme-pcie-m2-2280/ - only ever had an old Kingston SSD hard fail in the way that guy's did. Perhaps I'm due to be burned by Korean silicon next year... :D

https://seekingtech.com/rocket-nvme-vs-rocket-nvme-4-0-vs-rocket-q-nvme-vs-rocket-q4-nvme/ has useful SKU comparison tables if you've not already seen that.

Seems the Rocket's greatest weakness is sustained reads and writes, it can dramatically cliffedge once the cache is exhausted, whereas the Samsung can sustain higher throughputs for longer and the Evo Pluses are rated for 150 TB written per 250GB over life of drive. Larger Sabrent Qs are all QLC I think (the older PCIe Gen3 has TLC) but their 1 TB is only rated for 260 TBW which may inform your buying choice depending on your workload.


I think I'd run one of these but not as a mission critical disk, and I'd bang a massive heatsink on them to try and prevent death. I tend to not worry with the Samsungs, I keep an eye on temps but I've never had any major concerns even during very large read/write operations.

https://www.reddit.com/r/buildapcsa...2_ssd_sabrent_rocket_q_1tb_nvme_pcie_m2_2280/
https://www.reddit.com/r/buildapc/comments/b9j2jh/qlc_vs_tlc_ssd/

As I have perhaps slightly odd use cases for my SSDs I wanted something which wouldn't swandive during sustained writes, something the Sabrents do quite aggressively like the old Intel 660p/665p. See graphs under the "Sustained Write Performance and Cache Recovery" on TH's Rocket Q review - https://www.tomshardware.com/uk/reviews/sabrent-rocket-q-nvme-ssd/3

Half a TB of writes in one go is fairly nonstandard, but it's relevant to my use so I plumped for the Samsung which can stay at a reasonable speed. What stopped me buying one the other month was mostly the reviews from people who've owned the Rocket and Rocket Qs since early 2020 and have reported sudden failure or irreparable data loss after only a few months. Perhaps it's manufacturing issues or early batch problems.

[edit]
Just saw this review of the Rocket 4+ 2TB, seems generally favourable and the synthetic throughput benches are very impressive on a Gen4 4x board -- https://www.servethehome.com/sabrent-rocket-4-plus-2tb-review/ -- but given the much higher price, unless you want 6.8 GBps write vs 5 Gbps writes, would a Samsung 980 Pro not be a contender? https://premiumbuilds.com/comparisons/sabrent-rocket-4-plus-vs-samsung-980-pro/ has more comparisons.
 
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I got a used rocket 3 2TB from fleabay for 100£ all in. Was shocked when it arrived in a wet envelope. Like, JUST a wet envelope, but after testing in a work system (heh) I slapped it in mine and it is fine so far.
 
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