Yesterday, Sabrent gave the world a sneak peek of the world's first Thunderbolt 5 external SSD, using and benchmarking a prototype unit to establish baseline expectations for the next generation of external storage. The reveal from Sabrent comes just under a year after the official Thunderbolt 5 debut, which provided specs of a maximum 80 Gigabits bidirectional throughput (roughly 10 GB/s read/write theoretical maximum). Meanwhile, a TB5 Bandwidth Boost mode intended for displays reduces receive speeds to 40 Gigabits per second to boost transmit speeds to 120 Gigabits per second. However, this wouldn't be suited for external storage.
The sneak peek from Sabrent includes a brief peek at CrystalDiskMark benchmarking scores, which currently place the drive at around the speed level of an internal NVMe Gen 4 drive. 6 GB/s read and 5 GB/s write is nothing to scoff at— though, as one who has observed the original Intel presentation of the Thunderbolt 5 standard, it seems clear that there is still room for improvement. The Sabrent spokesperson in the video even says as much, saying, "There are still a few little tweaks we still have to do because we want to make the most out of this technology."
