Intel’s Thunderbolt 5 arguably is the best USB-C cable ever made, with 120Gbps of single-direction bandwidth, 240 watts of power, and enough power to drive external SSDs, eGPUs, and high-resolution, high-refresh-rate monitors from a single cable at best-of-class levels. Please put all that tech into an external hard drive. Oh, wait. Sabrent just announced it will have the world’s first external Thunderbolt 5 hard drives on the market.
Rocket XTRM 5 World’s First Thunderbolt 5 External SSD Drive
Sabrent has announced the Rocket XTRM 5 Thunderbolt External SSD Drive, which looks to be the fastest drive on the market. We are reaching the point where external connectivity is almost identical to internal SSD speeds. This is amazing, as we all want to have the faster external speeds possible without using the risky RAID 0 configuration.
Thunderbolt 5 allows for very fast external transfer speeds. An 80Gbps connection is enough speed to get the most out of the ROCKET XTRM5 SSD. The larger, faster capacities are promising for portable video editing. The ROCKET XTRM5 is backward-compatible, so you can get the most from the drive with Thunderbolt 3 and 4 systems.
Three Capacity Options
The Rocket XTRM 5 Thunderbolt 5 External SSD Drive will be available in three capacities. 1TB, 2TB, and 4TB models.
The Rocket XTRM5 uses Intel’s new Thunderbolt 5 technology. Obviously, you will need a TB5 computer to take advantage of the transfer speeds and these systems are not widely available yet. The new Razer Blade 18 features TB5, but Apple has yet to announce a product to date that also uses it. Apple has been using Thunderbolt in their systems for some time, and Thunderbolt 5 will come, but when is the next question?
I purchased the Sabrent Rocket XTRM-Q 8TB to use with an M1 Mackbook Pro and was impressed by its build quality, speed, and capacity. It still blows my mind that an 8TB Thunderbolt 3 SSD drive fits in the palm of my hand. Now, Thunderbolt 5 is coming soon in pretty much the same form factor. Very cool, indeed.
Availability
Pricing and availability have not been announced yet, but the Rocket XTRM-Q runs $700, so you can expect the new TB5 versions to be at least the same or more. I think it will be a while before we see this ship, as computers need to have TB5 to take full advantage.
