Sabrent Rocket Q4 4TB NVMe M.2 SSD Review

Today we are taking a look at the Sabrent Rocket Q4 4TB SSD. This is Sabrent’s highest capacity PCIe 4.0 SSD and features the Phison PS5016-E16 controller, DRAM cache, and Micron QLC NAND. This is the second Rocket Q4 drive we have reviewed, having looked at the smaller 2TB drive earlier. Additionally, we will pit the drive against Sabrent’s flagship drive the Rocket 4 Plus 2TB.

Sabrent Rocket Q4 4TB

The Sabrent Rocket Q4 4TB comes in a double-sided M.2 2280 (80mm) form factor.

Much like previous Sabrent drives, the drive label is applied on top of a thin copper heat spreader. Beneath the label and heat spreader, there is the Phison PS5016-E16 controller, a DRAM cache, and 2 Micron 96L 1024GB NAND packages.

The back has a product information label, the other half of the DRAM cache, and the other 2 1024GB NAND packages.

Sabrent Rocket Q4 Specs

The Sabrent Rocket Q4 line of TLC-based SSDs has been announced in sizes ranging from 1TB to 4TB.

Our 4TB drive is the top-of-the-line SKU. This drive is rated at 4950 MB/s sequential read, and 3550 MB/s sequential write speeds. 800 TBW represents a smaller than average rated endurance for a drive of this size, and in fact, all of the endurance levels for the Rocket Q4 line are on the small side. By comparison, the PCIe 3.0 Sabrent Rocket Q 4TB had a 940 TBW endurance rating, and the recently reviewed (and smaller) Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus 2TB with its TLC NAND had a rated endurance of 1400 TBW. While 800 TBW of endurance is still more than sufficient to last well beyond the warranty period for normal consumer loads, the overall downward trend of drive endurance is not a positive one and something we hope to see reverse course in time.

CrystalDiskInfo can give us some basic information about the SSD, and confirms we are operating at PCIe 4.0 x4 speeds using NVMe 1.3.

Test System Configuration

We are using the following configuration for this test:

• Motherboard: ASUS PRIME X570-P
• CPU: AMD Ryzen 9 3900X (12C/24T)
• RAM: 2x 16GB DDR4-3200 UDIMMs

Our testing uses the Sabrent Rocket Q4 4TB as the boot drive for the system, installed in the M.2_1 slot on the motherboard. The drive is filled to 85% capacity with data and then some is deleted, leaving around 60% used space on the volume.

Next, we are going to get into our performance testing.