We compared the Sabrent 1TB Rocket 4 PLUS M.2 NVMe SSD and the heat sink combo with a Western Digital Black SN850 and a 5mm ICY BOX heat sink. Our speed tests also include a Samsung 980 Pro. All drives have the same capacity, 1TB, and exceed Sony's read speed recommendations.
The ambient temperature during our test sessions was kept close to 23 degrees Celsius.
To monitor operating temperatures, we installed three K-type thermocouples on the SSDs: one on the flash memory, one on the controller, and one on the controller's DRAM. To test, we wanted to apply the highest possible stress to the drive, by moving vast amounts of data. We began by moving several games, 243.7GB of data, from the internal storage to the SSD drives and vice versa.
The first operation forced the SSD to perform prolonged write operations, while the second operation did the same for read procedures. We logged temperatures during the entire write and read operations and measured the time required for each process to finish to calculate the average transfer speeds. If increased operating temperatures caused the SSD controller to throttle, speeds would drop.
We tested the following scenarios:
- Sabrent 1TB Rocket 4 Plus with the original cover
- Sabrent 1TB Rocket 4 Plus with the Sabrent SSD cover
- Sabrent 1TB Rocket 4 Plus without any SSD cover
- SN850 without a heat sink installed and with the SSD cover in place
- SN850 without a heat sink installed and without the SSD cover
- SN850 with a heat sink installed and with the SSD cover in place
- SN850 with a heat sink installed and without the SSD cover in place
Once you install an NVMe SSD in your PS5, you will be asked to format it, and once this is done, the operating system will run a benchmark to find the read speed of the drive.
In this test, the Sabrent 1TB Rocket 4 Plus takes the lead from the WD SN850 and the Samsung 980 Pro, but the real-life results will reveal the actual winner.
