The Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus (starts at $89.99 for 500GB; $1,499.99 for 8TB as tested) combines good speed and durability with massive capacity in an internal solid-state drive. Its general storage and gaming test scores were on the low side compared to other PCI Express 4.0 SSDs we've tested, though to be fair none of the PCIe 4.0 models had more than a quarter of the Sabrent's storage space. If you want colossal capacity with decent performance, the Rocket 4 Plus is one of the few games in town; the few other 8TB M.2 drives we've seen have all been PCIe 3.0 models.

All the Storage You Can Get, All From One Slot

The Rocket 4 Plus is a four-lane PCIe 4.0 drive manufactured on an M.2 Type-2280 (80mm long) "gumstick" PCB. It employs the NVMe 1.3 protocol over the PCIe 4.0 bus. It comes with 112-layer Toshiba BiCS5 3D TLC NAND flash, 2x 8GB SK Hynix DRAM, and a Phison PS5018-E18 controller. (Check out our glossary of SSD terms if any of this lingo is new to you.)

Our test unit came with an optional heatsink ($25), a large copper/aluminum unit designed for use in desktop computers and shown below. Sabrent also sells a much thinner heatsink designed for use with a Sony PlayStation 5, but you should note that the PS5's maximum secondary storage capacity is 4TB, so while smaller-capacity Rocket 4 Plus SSDs will work, our 8TB model won't.

The table below lists capacity, price, durability, and rated throughput for the different versions of the Rocket 4 Plus. While the first four versions use 176-layer Micron B47R 3D NAND flash, the 8TB drive sticks to the 112-layer BiCS5 NAND mentioned above due to space considerations on the actual PCB, according to Sabrent.

You can see that, value-wise, the Rocket 4 Plus' sweet spot is 2TB, with a cost of just 10 cents per gigabyte. From there, both the higher- and lower-capacity versions get progressively more expensive. As is typical with SSDs, huge capacity is a luxury for which you pay extra on a per-gig basis. This is only the second 8TB SSD we've ever tested after the Sabrent Rocket Q, a PCI Express 3.0 device with QLC-based memory.

The Rocket 4 Plus uses more durable TLC memory, as is reflected in its "terabytes written" (TBW) spec, a manufacturer's estimate of how much data can be written to a drive before some cells begin to fail and get taken out of service. Our test unit's 5,600TBW rating is considerably better than the 8TB Rocket Q's 1,800TBW.

Sabrent officially warranties the Rocket 4 Plus for five years (or until you hit the rated TBW figure in data writes, whichever comes first), but you must register with the company to get the full warranty. (Unregistered drives are backed for only two years.) Sabrent sells the drive through Amazon as well as from its own site.

Testing the Rocket 4 Plus: Some Solid Speeds

We test PCI Express 4.0 internal SSDs using a desktop testbed with an MSI X570 motherboard and AMD Ryzen CPU, 16GB of Corsair Dominator DDR4 memory clocked to 3,600MHz, and a discrete graphics card.

We put the 8TB Rocket 4 Plus through our usual internal solid-state drive benchmarks, comprising Crystal DiskMark 6.0 and PCMark 10 Storage. We're also including results for a relatively new test, UL's 3DMark Storage Benchmark, which measures a drive's performance in a number of gaming-related tasks.

Let's start with Crystal DiskMark's sequential speed tests, which provide a traditional measure of drive throughput, simulating best-case, straight-line transfers of large files...

While the Rocket 4 Plus effectively matched its rated sequential write speed, its sequential read speed fell a bit short. Still, the drive takes its place in the middle of the pack of PCI Express 4.0 NVMe speedsters, the only 8TB device so far in our upper echelon.

PCMark 10's overall storage test measures a drive's speed in performing a variety of everyday storage tasks, while the so-called PCMark 10 trace results measure its mettle for specific tasks such as booting the operating system, loading creative apps and games, and copying both small and large files.

The Rocket 4 Plus landed in the lower third of our comparison group in PCMark 10, and its trace results were generally unremarkable as well. It did manage the second-best score in copying large ISO files. Its 3DMark gaming score was at the low end of the group.

The Verdict: This Fast, This Big? It'll Cost You

As one of the only 8TB general-purpose internal SSDs available, Sabrent's Rocket 4 Plus provides cavernous capacity and throughput speed befitting a high-performance PCIe 4.0 drive. Its general and gaming benchmark results were on the low side compared with similar (but smaller-capacity) drives, though it was much quicker than the only other 8TB M.2 SSD we've tested, its Rocket Q stablemate.

Although the 8TB drive exceeds Sony's upper limit for secondary SSDs for the PlayStation 5, any of the smaller Rocket 4 Plus models should serve for use with a PS5. Since the 8TB version uses 112-layer TLC NAND rather than its siblings' 176-layer Micron B47R NAND, both the 2TB and 4TB drives have considerably higher write-speed ratings, and the 2TB Rocket 4 Plus costs barely half as much on a per-gigabyte basis.

Still, if you have the cash, the 8TB Rocket 4 Plus gives you monumental storage capacity and PCI Express 4.0 speed in a durable internal SSD, if you have just one PCIe 4.0 slot you can fill. It's a great addition for a game or multimedia library with room for most anything you might wish to store.