SABRENT M.2 NVMe SSD 500gb 4x4, Solid State 5000 MB/s Read, PCIe 4.0 2280, M2 Hard Drive High Performance Compatible with PCs, NUCs Laptops and Desktops TLC Nand (SB-ROCKET-NVMe4-500)

I purchased the 1TB drive with included heatsink on Amazon Prime day for just over £140, absolute bargain for a 1 TB PCIe 4.0 NVMe drive (remember you need an AMD X570 board to enable PCIe 4.0 speeds )Firstly the packaging, all I can say is wow ! The drive itself comes embedded in a foam layer inside a metallic copper coloured tin, very smart. The heatsink comes in its own box, and includes four screws to attach the drive tray to the heatsink (which is surprisingly weighty for its size), a small screwdriver and that very elusive M2 screw (are you listening Samsung? )Installation is straightforward providing you have enough space to work in. The Serial number required for warrenty activation is on a removable label on the underside of drive. make a note of the number or remove the label before fitting the drive into the heatsink.You need to download the Acronis cloning software from the Sabrent website. The software was easy to use and did a perfect job of cloning my old C:\ drive (Samsung Evo Plus)As for the drive speed itself, its pretty mush as advertised Using Crystal DiskMark I got a tad over 5000mb read and around 4250 write on the default test easily beating the 500GB Samsung EVO Plus I was using before and the 1 TB Western Digital Black which currently occupies my second m2 slot.All in all I am very impressed

I had been putting off the update to the latest Gen4 NVME for a few months as although you don't really see much 'real world' difference - you are really seeing fractions of a difference in loading times in comparison to Gen 3 - I finally decided to take the plunge and oh boy! what a piece of tech this is!I have a Ryzen 3600 with MSI MAG X570 Tomahawk mobo - so was capable of using Gen 4 NVME.*Word of note* Check your MOBO slot as you may have 2, 1 will be a direct pipe to the CPU and 1 will be a MOBO line (chipset) - For best performance, use the CPU LINE - This will often be the M2 slot closest to the CPU.**2nd word of note** Your MOBO heat spreader will be sufficient, you don't need the ostensibly large spreader that Sabrent makes.Now on to performance.I ran this through Crystal Disk Mark several times consecutively and this was my result after 5 runs.To say this is quick is an understatement.Aside from the potentially artificial results here, real-world results were that the latest windows 10 installed off a USB2 memory stick (so not even a USB3 device) in less than 3 minutes. You cant even make a decent cup of tea in that time.***3rd Word of note*** REMEMBER TO WRITE DOWN YOUR SERIAL BEFORE YOU INSTALL.My NVME shipped with no serial sticker on the box or the tin. I was way too happy throwing it into my rig to even check and then went to register it and was thinking of tearing the rig down when I remembered! Crystal Disk Info! This will get your serial number from your NVME and you can simply copy and paste it into the registration document. VOILA. So in fact, throw this stick into that slot and get to enjoy the pleasure at the finish.All in all, if your system is capable of using Gen4, the tech is now there and this is at the time of writing the review (£168), cheaper than the Samsung 960 EVO plus which is Gen3 (£180) and the Samsung 960 Pro Gen3 (£299).Heck, even if it isn't Gen4 ready, buy it, and if? you upgrade later to a new MOBO etc, you won't need a new NVME.

I needed to replace my small Sata SSD and having had a Gen 3 Sabrent Rocket decided that it was time to purchase a more recent version as my Motherboard could take advantage of the extra “speed”.I was a little worried that the heatsink might not fit, or would catch against something but my fears were unfounded and it slotted in perfectly.On the subject of the heatsink, it came nicely packaged with 5 screws and a small screwdriver - everything needed to fit the heatsink and drive to the motherboard. This was a nice touch and saved me searching for one.Transferring the data was super easy using the freely downloadable Acronis cloning tool from the Sabrent website. A quick install and it was cloned in no time at all.It even booted first time and I had no need to enter the bios to adjust boot settings. In fact this was one of the easiest upgrades I’ve done in a while.Out of interest I did a benchmark and saw sequential reads at the advertised speeds - 6 times that of the previous Sata drive. Random reads and writes were much slower but still extremely quick.However, I’ve personally not noticed a huge speed increase in real world usage as I’m not transferring files or other read/write activity but I am happy with the drive as it increased my storage space.All in all, I could have paid less and gone for a Gen3 drive and have been happy, but this will last me a few years and I’m happy knowing the artificial benchmarks are much faster than what I previously had installed.