The Sabrent Rocket 2TB PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD promises the rare combo of top-end performance and excellent value for money. As its name suggests, this is an M.2 NVMe PCIe 4.0 SSD that offers the potential for up to 5,000 MB/s of throughput, yet is not unaffordably priced. This 2TB drive costs about $400, while the much more affordable 1TB model is about $200.

The performance of this 2TB drive is essentially the same as the 1TB model, but with half the capacity and therefore half the price. It is a curious mechanism. Like the Addlink S90 drive we recently reviewed, this super-fast SSD is very reasonably priced at 20 cents per gigabyte.

For what it's worth, this is not the cheapest way to integrate an NVMe drive into your system. If you are looking for a more affordable route, the Addlink S70 listed in our NVMe SSD guide is a great option.

This drive is worth 12 cents per gigabyte, which is currently the highest of any PCIe 3.0 NVMe drive. This is the highest level available today for a PCIe 3.0 NVMe drive. Note that this market is currently booming and prices fluctuate almost daily.

Sabrent's next-generation lineup actually comes in three different models: 500GB, 1TB, and the high-capacity 2TB model I'm looking at here. the 500GB model's write and 4K performance are not as good as the SSD's memory controller channel are not all implemented and take a serious hit, and are actually not much better than PCIe 3.0 SSDs (other than a healthy 5GB/s read). [Makes more sense than slower PCIe 4.0 drives.

All three PCIe 4.0 Sabrent Rocket drives use the same Phison PS5016-E16 controller and Toshiba TLC NAND flash. This makes the performance of these drives virtually indistinguishable, and Sabrent has combined this solid state core with DDR4 cache to help speed things along.

So far, not much separates the Sabrent Rocket PCIe 4.0 drive from the Addlink S90. However, Sabrent has paid a bit more attention to the end-user experience, bundling a heatsink as well as a copy of Acronis True Image to copy the current installation to the new drive, and Sabrent's ability to monitor the overall status of the drive It also provides access to the Control Panel utility.

The heatsink is the highlight of this bundle, as it is a funky little thing that not only looks good, but also lowers the drive's operating temperature by a few degrees more: the heatsink that came with the Gigabyte X579 Aorus Master was 61°C during testing, while the drive with it installed recorded a maximum of 54°C. However, this is still perfectly acceptable and does not indicate a throttle threat.

The heatsink package includes a base plate, thermal pad, main aluminum cooler with copper heat pipes, and the screws needed to assemble it. Also included is a small screwdriver. Small accessories, but nothing else needed to assemble the cooler (it is very easy to assemble). The cooler is a bit bulky and may get in the way of add-in cards, depending on your setup and the location of the M.2 slots; if you are mounting it on a Mini-ITX board, you may not be able to use the SSD cooling system because the NVMe socket is below.

In our tests, the Sabrent Rocket PCIe 4.0 was impressive. In fact, it outperformed almost every drive we looked at recently in almost every test. The Addlink S90 comes very close, and while it would not realistically be possible to directly compare their performance, the (slight) advantage, plus the addition of a heatsink and additional software, makes this Sabrent drive the better overall choice.

The numbers of note here are sequential reads and writes from the ATTO disk benchmark, at 5,262 MB/sec and 4,185 MB/sec, respectively. It goes without saying, however, that sequential throughput is not the be-all and end-all of SSD performance. The likelihood of copying gigabytes of data this way is actually quite low, except when installing something new. In other words, while these are headline-grabbing numbers, they are not necessarily necessary with respect to day-to-day activity.

The 4K random numbers are a bit more realistic on this front, but again, the Sabrent drive is impressive. 190MB/s writes clearly benefit from DDR4 cache, and 72MB/s reads are not bad either. Intel's Optane drives are very good in this regard, delivering about 150MB/sec for 4K reads, but the Sabrent Rocket manages to impress here as well, with almost the same throughput for writes.

Achieving these numbers requires a motherboard and CPU that support PCIe 4.0, which currently includes an AMD Ryzen 3000 processor and an X570 or B550 motherboard. Otherwise, you will hit the limits of the PCIe 3.0 interface, with peak read and write rates of 3.4 GB/sec.

Overall, the Sabrent Rocket 2TB PCIe 4.0 is a fundamentally superior performer, while at the same time offering excellent value for money. With software to get you up and running, monitoring tools, and a cool heatsink if you want one, this is by far the best choice if you want a PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD right now.