New Sabrent Rocket SSD breaks seal on Thunderbolt 5 drives

We don’t know when it will be released, we don’t know how much it will cost, but we do know that Sabrent’s forthcoming Rocket SSD will use Thunderbolt 5 and be very, very fast.

Thunderbolt 5 was announced by Intel last September, making it one of the few things the beleaguered company has actually got right in recent months (just in case you’ve been on holiday for a very long time, it’s just laid off 15,000 employees and suspended its dividend   as it looks to catch up with its rivals, some of whom have their own problems - it’s tough out there).

Anyway, Thunderbolt 5 is going to be great. It promises to deliver three times the bandwidth of the best tech currently on the market with 80 Gbps of bi-directional bandwidth. This can be further boosted with Bandwidth Boost to provide up to 120 Gbps for the best display experience. Display and data connections are going to positively hum as a result, and according to Intel it’s even ‘broadly’ compatible with previous versions of Thunderbolt and USB.

According to a teaser video that you can see below, Sabrent has taken all this and run with it for its forthcoming Rocket SSD. The result is some seriously impressive performance, at least as far as its own tests indicate. We’re talking numbers over 6000 MBps on the read and 5000 MBps on the write. 

“This means that you are getting near enough internal SSD speeds from an external drive,” says the video. “A few years ago these numbers would have been unheard of.”

Interestingly, the new Rocket SSD also delivers decent performance on older kit as well (though ‘older’ here is relative). Plugging it into a Thunderbolt 4-capable Mac, it still manages read/write speeds over 3000 MBps.

Obviously there will be a question over how sustainable that sort of performance is. The current generation Rocket SSDs tend to be a bit thermally limited, but the video says, “We are seeing even better temperatures so not only are you getting all of that high speed, but the temperatures are incredible on this as well.”

Time will tell. While it might be the first drive to break cover, whether it will be the first to make it to market is a different thing all together. Then we will find out how that performance measures up in the real world.

tl;dr

• Sabrent's upcoming Rocket SSD uses Thunderbolt 5 to deliver  impressive performance with over 6000 MBps read and 5000 MBps write speeds.
• Thunderbolt 5 offers three times the bandwidth of current technology and up to 120 Gbps with Bandwidth Boost.
• The Rocket SSD also performs well with older Thunderbolt 4-capable Macs, delivering over 3000 MBps read/write speeds.
• Concerns about the sustainability of this performance exist due to potential thermal limitations, but Sabrent claims improved temperatures.
• No release date or pricing as yet.