Over at Amazon, you can snag a Sabrent Rocket 1TB SSD with an NVMe Gen4 interface for $144.48 right now, saving you $25 over its normal selling price. And in doing so, you could potentially tap into read speeds in the neighborhood of 5,000MB/s.That depends on a variety of factors, like what kind of data you are shuffling around and, more importantly, what platform you are installing this drive into. To take full advantage of this drive’s speed capabilities, you need an AMD Ryzen 5000 (Zen 3) or Ryzen 3000 (Zen 2) series CPU paired with an X570 or B550 motherboard.Motherboards based on Intel’s Z590 chipset also support PCIe 4.0, when mated with an upcoming Rocket Lake CPU.This is still a fast drive even without PCIe 4.0 support, but it really takes off in the right platform, with Sabrent rating the drive to hit up to 5,000MB/s of sequential read performance and up to 4,400MB/s of sequential write performance. In our hands-on testing, we saw the 2TB model get up to 5,262MB/s in ATTO’s read test, and 4,185MB/s in the benchmark’s write test.The pricing here is attractive for a PCIe 4.0 model. We’ll be keeping an eye on things, but it seems vendors are starting to reduce the price of the initial batch of PCIe 4.0 SSDs, as the newest variants with upgraded controllers push data transfers to over 7,000MB/s, which gets closer to saturating the bus. For example, WD’s Black SN850, one of the best SSDs for gaming, boasts 7,000MB/s reads and 5,300MB/s writes, priced at $229.99 for the 1TB model.These earlier PCIe 4.0 models are still incredibly fast. Games don’t yet fully tap into their speed capabilities, but that could change with the PS5 and Xbox Series X both sporting PCIe 4.0 SSDs, and Microsoft making available its DirectStorage API for Windows.Sabrent’s 2TB Rocket is also on sale, priced at $297.48 (down from $349.99) on Amazon, if you want more storage space.
