I feel like I've unlocked a rarified nerd achievement in being the first customer to leave a review of this brand new external ssd from Sabrent, the Rocket XTRM 5. The 5 in its product name obviously being indicative of Thunderbolt 5. I purchased the 4TB model and at the time of writing it is still only up for preorder on Sabrent's web site, which is pretty wild. Amazon not only came through with stocking the product but also a killer price for Prime Day. It was almost too good to be true!While it may be a bit daft to post a five star review the day of receiving this product, I have no reason to doubt its longevity. I've had multiple Sabrent drives from this same range, in smaller disk capacities, back in the days of the Thunderbolt 3-spec and they never gave me any problem. This updated Thunderbolt 5 iteration stays true to Sabrent's "Rocket XTRM" product/design language. It remains very small and comes with a most-appreciated silicone jacket. This not only helps with physical protection and bumps, or I suppose if you were to drop the drive from a short distance, but moreover it keeps the drive less hot to the touch. Without the silicone jacket it absolutely gets pretty hot. My other drives have always also been like this, so it comes with the territory. The included TB5 cable is also a nice length (right around 19"). It isn't too short like I've seen other drives come supplied with. If anything, I wish it was shorter!Now, for the fun part. The speed tests. As you can see from my screenshots, yes, the drive is blazing fast. It is faster than any external drive that I have ever used by a large margin. I included a screenshot of its performance in "Blackmagic Disk Speed Test" as well as "Magic Disk Benchmark." These were all on a MacBook Pro 16" with an M4 Max processor and Mac OS 15.5. Since this current model MacBook Pro is Thunderbolt 5-equipped, you are able to take maximum advantage of the ssd performance (and why else would you purchase it, if you do not have a TB5 host computer? Unless you were "future proofing..."). In one of the tests, you can see that it reported that the read speeds were actually faster than the internal ssd of the computer itself. Regardless of it being able to potentially rival the speed of your internal ssd, it handily trounced my other external ssd I've been using over the past year, which is the Thunderbolt 3-spec SanDisk Professional PRO-G40, which is also in a 4TB capacity. Based on the tests you can see in the screenshots, it isn't terribly far off from being twice as fast in both read and write speeds. Depending on what you use your computer for, that level of a speed upgrade may justify the admittedly hefty pricetag. It kind of blows my mind to think that an external drive could sustain read and write speeds of four to five gigabytes per second, but here we are!If you're looking for what is certainly among the top tier of the fastest external drives that you can pop out of a box and connect to your computer, no need for assembling your own storage and enclosure, this is it. I will revise my review if I end up having some debacle in the future, but for now this is a most impressive addition to my home+work setup (I'm a creative professional).Of note, on Sabrent's web site you can register the drive to extend your warranty from one year up to three years.*** UPDATE ***Four months after my initial review (that I wrote at a time when the product had just launched) and thankfully I have nothing but positive things to say about it. Zero issues with it ejecting itself. I work from the latest versions of Mac OS — maybe if users are having problems with it, then they are on different operating systems and, thus, using it with a different file storage format instead of encrypted APFS. I’ve been using the drive nearly every day and it hasn’t given me any issues whatsoever. For someone who is constantly working with massive Photoshop files and then having them render within a litany of InDesign documents, this drive is par excellence. We’re talking editing and saving files that are often easily 1gb+ in size and you can just blaze through your workloads with minimal wait time. I suppose that you could complain, yes, it gets very hot to the touch (less so if you hold it by the included silicone jacket), but all of my other external Thunderbolt ssd units, which aren’t even close to being as fast, have been similarly hot to the touch. Of note, I was very lucky and snagged one of these during some special sale or Prime Day event, knocking $200 off. It was still expensive. As they say, you get what you pay for.
