Sabrent is a manufacturer that has carved out a niche for itself in the high-performance storage market, initially with its Sabrent Rocket SSD, which was the world’s first to offer over 7,000 MB/s. Since then, the company has launched various products and accessories, and today it’s the turn of one of them: the Sabrent Rocket XTRM5 external SSDwith connection Thunderbolt 5 which offers similar speeds to what you would get with an internal SSD. Let’s see.
The truth is that there are many external enclosures on the market to install an SSD inside and use it as an external USB device, but the bad side is that, due to the interface and controller of the enclosure itself, the transmission speed of the data is quite small. But this changes a lot thanks to the Thunderbolt 5 interface, which offers a bandwidth of up to 80 Gbps, so let’s see what this new Sabrent product is capable of.
Sabrent XTRM5, an external SSD with Thunderbolt 5
Sabrent has officially unveiled its new Rocket XTRM5 portable SSD, which automatically becomes the company’s flagship external drive. As we have already mentioned, its interface is Thunderbolt 5 (although it is also compatible with Thunderbolt 4 and 3, logically reducing its speed) and according to the manufacturer it is able to take advantage of the 80 Gbps of bandwidth offered by the interface, almost without losses. Of course, we have not seen that it includes Intel Banwidth Boost technology (this would allow it to have 120 Gbps in reading or writing, and 40 Gbps in the other direction).
This portable SSD, like most of those on the market today, consists of an external enclosure in which an SSD in M.2 2280 format is installed, in this case PCIe 5.0 to offer the highest speed. Sabrent has not given official performance figures, but they have said that it has almost no loss due to its controller and this means that it should have speeds of around 64 Gbps (the maximum theoretical bandwidth of Gen 4 x4 per direction).
The manufacturer is expected to release this external SSD in 1, 2, and 4TB capacity variants, meaning Sabrent will install one of its best PCIe 5.0 SSDs right from the factory. The case is made of aluminum and has a ventilation grill to keep the M.2 drive inside at a good temperature, and in fact it is expected that there will be a passive heat sink inside.
At the moment, Sabrent has not communicated the official date on which this Rocket XTRM5 will arrive in stores or its price, but given that it contains a PCIe 5.0 SSD, we can expect it to be quite expensive. Imagine, a 1TB PCIe 5.0 SSD from Sabrent like the Rocket 5 costs about 220 dollars, while the 4TB unit of this same family costs about 840 dollars, so this case will cost more or less, surely a little more.
