Sabrent has announced the Rocket XTRM-Q, a 16TB external SSD drive. Essentially it is two 8TB M.2 NVMe drives that can run in a RAID configuration.
In their haste to publish the news, they even managed to get the capacity wrong on their Twitter post!
The Sabrent Rocket XTRM-Q 16TB features solid aluminum construction, which the company claims increases durability and maximum heat dissipation. There is also an integrated temperature and health monitoring system. A power adapter is required and included. You can not bus power this hard drive.
Speed
According to Sabrent, the Rocket XTRM-Q has single disk speeds of up to 1400 MB/s or up to 2800MB/s when using RAID 0 mode.
What Configurations can you run?
As I mentioned earlier, this is a dual disk external drive that contains two separate 8TB disks for a total of 16TB. These two disks can be used independently or combined via software to be used as a single drive.
The drives can be run in the following configurations:
- x2 Indepandant 8TB drives
- RAID 0: Data is interleaved across two or more physical disks allowing for maximized performance
- RAID 1: Maintains a copy of the same data on both disks, faux-tolerant but storage is halved
- JBOD/SEQUENTIAL: Writes data until the disk is full and then moves on to writing on the second disk
Intel Thunderbolt 3 Controller
Sabrent claims they are one of the only manufacturers and brands that are fully certified by Intel to use Thunderbolt 3 technology in their products.
RAID Set-Up
Above you can see two videos that show you how to properly set up a RAID on a Mac or a PC.
Price & Availability
The Sabrent Rocket XTRM-Q 16Tb SSD is officially listed at $3,299.99 USD, but on Amazon it is selling for $2,899.99 USD. On the surface this sounds like a lot of money, but as a comparison, the OWC 16TB ThunderBlade Thunderbolt 3 SSD RAID Array retails for $4,379.00 USD.
