Samsung Versus Sabrent – Seeking SSD Supremacy

PCIe 4.0 Showdown
PCIe 4.0 drives are becoming plentiful on the market with several models available to choose from which inevitably leads to questions about which one makes the most sense to purchase. There are a number of attributes that can be measured, not just the overall performance but the speed at which the drives can perform certain tasks, while one might be best at handling huge sustained writes it may not perform as well in the short random reads which a gamer is more interested in. As well there is the question of price to consider; not just the total at the cash register but the performance you get per dollar.
TechSpot looks to try to help you navigate through this by taking a look at the top two consumer drives on the market, Sabrent’s Rocket 4 Plus as well as Samsung’s 980 Pro. To offer some comparative performance numbers they have also included the previous generation of drives from these two companies, the PCIe 3.0 970 Pro and and the PCIe 4.0 Rocket 4.
As you might expect the results are close, with the 980 Pro offering faster performance in copying media and launching Flight Simulator, but it loses to the Rocket 4 PLUS on game level loads; though only by a matter of split seconds. When they looked at large file transfers, specifically tests totalling 1TB worth of reads and 1TB worth of reads the Rocket 4 PLUS showed significantly better performance.
They wrap up their review with a look at pricing, which for many is the most important benchmark of the entire piece. Again, the results are incredibly close with Sabrent’s offering currently selling for $0.20/GB and Samsung at $0.23/GB. There is no clear runaway winner at the end, other than the fact that you will be happy with whichever drive you pick up and the best advice for you is to keep your eye out for sales.
Samsung offers some of the best SSDs on the market, but Sabrent rocked the boat with their PCI 4.0 drive the last generation. The new Samsung SSD 980 Pro and Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus are now out, and here comes our test.