CONCLUSION

   Purely for reasons of cost Thunderbolt 3 was never a widespread connectivity in the PC community/market and I for one always thought that it was a waste of a rather impressive technology. I mean just look at today’s charts, the Rocket XTRM-Q easily surpassed every other portable SSD in them and it’s not even the fastest model of the XTRM-Q line by Sabrent (the 16TB variant has two 8TB Rocket Q M.2 NVMe SSDs in RAID 0 configuration). Thankfully the arrival of the new and slightly improved Thunderbolt 4 connectivity may change things for the better so more PC consumers can take advantage of the data transfer speeds offered by it. Performance aside there’s not much else I can say about the Rocket XTRM-Q portable SSD by Sabrent. Build quality is pretty much excellent and as for temperatures the Rocket Q SSD does run hot but luckily it transfers most of that heat onto the solid aluminum enclosure (which means that the enclosure runs quite hot after just a few minutes of intense read and write operations).

   Even though availability seems to be low for the 8TB variant of the Rocket XTRM-Q portable SSD you should be able to find it soon for around USD1400 inside the USA (Amazon.com) and for around 1500Euros inside the EU (Amazon.de). Needless to say, the Rocket XTRM-Q line is not really aimed towards casual consumers and gamers but still it’s a very expensive piece of hardware with a somewhat limited target audience. That being said if you need lots of storage capacity on the go in a tiny format and performance is really crucial for you then the Sabrent XTRM-Q is probably your best choice which is also why it gets the Platinum Award.

PROS

- Build Quality (Solid Aluminum Enclosure)
- Excellent Performance (Surpasses 2650MB/s)
- Design / Size
- Available Capacities (500GB/1TB/2TB/4TB/8TB/16TB)
- Compatibility (Thunderbolt 3 / USB Gen 3.2 Gen 2)
- 5 Year Limited Warranty

CONS

- Price (For Some)
- Current Availability