Sabrent’s Upcoming Portable Rocket SSD is the First to Use Thunderbolt 5

Aug 02, 2024

Jaron Schneider

A hand with decorated nails holds a black Sabrent external SSD, which has a lightning bolt icon. The SSD is connected to a laptop in the background.

Sabrent shared an early look at its next portable SSD, the new Rocket, which is the first to use Thunderbolt 5. It’s incredibly fast and, perhaps more importantly, promises to regulate heat better.

Thunderbolt 5 was announced by Intel last September and promised three times the bandwidth of Thunderbolt 4, with bi-directional bandwidth of 80 gigabits per second (Gbps) and 120Gbps with Bandwidth Boost. The existing Thunderbolt 4 only offers 32Gbps of data bandwidth, for comparison. While much faster, it doesn’t sacrifice backward compatibility and will work with Thunderbolt 4 devices too.

That’s important because Sabrent shows what to expect with the new Rocket SSD when connected to both new Thunderbolt 5 PCs as well as current Thunderbolt 4 Macs.

As expected, its performance on Thunderbolt 5 is the most impressive, with read speeds of over 6,000 MB/s and write speeds of over 5,000 MB/s — that’s over twice the read performance of the best Thunderbolt 4 SSDs and almost double their write speeds.

A CrystalDiskMark software window showing disk benchmarking results. The read and write speeds in MB/s are as follows: Sequential (SEQ1M Q8T1): 6071.60 read, 5126.09 write. SEQ1M Q1T1: 3797.00 read, 4216.53 write. Random (RND4K Q32T1): 460.77 read, 363.24 write. RND4K Q1T1: 50.87 read, 109.84 write. — Thunderbolt 5 performance

But the new SSD isn’t just fast with Thunderbolt 5 computers. Thanks to backward compatibility, the new SSD also works with existing computers, including the latest from Apple. There, Sabrent showed nearly 3,000 MB/s read and write speeds — faster than any other high-end SSD PetaPixel has ever tested.

A screenshot of a Disk Speed Test by Blackmagicdesign. The write speed is 2959.8 MB/s, and the read speed is 2916.2 MB/s. The table below shows different video formats and their compatibility with these speeds for both writing and reading in various resolutions. — Thunderbolt 4 performance

Of note, in PetaPixel‘s testing of portable SSDs, Sabrent’s current Thunderbolt 4 Rocket SSD was fast but it was unable to retain high speed due to what was believed to be too much heat. While it burst very high, PetaPixel eventually elected not to include it in its guide because of its inconsistent peaks and valleys and how hot it was to physically handle after intense data transfers.

Close-up of a black laptop with a Thunderbolt 3 port. A Thunderbolt cable is plugged into the port, featuring a distinctive lightning bolt symbol with the number "3" next to it. The laptop’s keyboard and part of the screen bezel are visible on the left.

Sabrent says the new Rocket Thunderbolt 5 SSD has better heat efficiency: “We are seeing even better temperatures, so not only are you getting those high speeds, but the temperatures are incredible on this as well.” This is an early look and the product is still in the prototype phase, so Sabrent did not provide specifics on heat.

The new Rocket SSD appears close to completion, but Sabrent hasn’t said when to expect the SSD to come to market nor how much it will charge for it. Whenever it is ready though, it stands to be the fastest available portable SSD available — by a lot.

Image credits: Sabrent