The first external SSD drive with a Thunderbolt 5 interface

When Intel confirmed that the latest Thunderbolt 5 standard is ready, and that we'll be able to take advantage of bandwidth up to 120 Gbps, 240 watts of power, and more than enough performance to run multiple external SSDs, external graphics cards, and high-resolution monitors at the same time, we could only be speechless. This is a huge improvement, but even though something is confirmed, it does not mean that we can go to the store the next day and buy it.

Well, Cable Matters recently became the first to ship Thunderbolt 5 cables, and today we can go to a store (aka Amazon) and buy them. Other manufacturers followed soon after. Therefore, it is not surprising that the first external Solid State drive equipped with a Thunderbolt 5 interface recently appeared on the market. This is the Rocket XTRM 5 external drive, prepared for the most demanding users by Sabrent.

The Sabrent Rocket XTRM 5 drive features an M.2 2280 interface that hosts a PCIe Gen 5 NVMe SSD drive. Its trump card is, of course, its exceptional speed of operation. This can reach up to 6,000 megabytes per second in reading mode and up to 5,000 megabytes per second when writing data. Here, in practice, it actually means that the Sabrent Rocket XTRM 5 external Solid State drive is quite comparable in speed to internal Solid State drives.

The Sabrent Rocket XTRM 5 external drive is available in three different capacities. The customer can choose between one terabyte, two terabytes and four terabytes of space. Unfortunately, Sabrent has yet to reveal any other specs for the newcomers. Unfortunately, their availability and retail price also remain a mystery. Considering that these are the first external Solid State drives with a Thunderbolt 5 interface, they will certainly not be exactly cheap.