Rocket XTRM-Q 16TB External Thunderbolt 3 SSD Review – Can an SSD Ever be Too Big?

TSSDR TEST BENCH AND PROTOCOL

SSD testing at TSSDR differs slightly, depending on whether we are looking at consumer or enterprise storage media. In today’s testing we will be comparing performance of this Sabrent Rocket XTRM-Q 16TB External Aluminum SSD on our Intel Gen 4 Test Bench PC. This PC has been optimized to provide the absolute highest performance available, and have been optimized with our SSD Optimization Guide.

INTEL Z590 PCIe 4.0 TEST BENCH

For this Test Bench, the CPU C-States, Enhanced Intel SpeedStep Technology (EIST) and Intel Speedshift (P-States) have not been disabled. As you will see below, the system is also bumped to 5.3GHz with memory at full speed in its XMP 2 profile.

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The components of this Test Bench are detailed below. All hardware is linked for purchase and product sales may be reached by a simple click on the individual item. As well, the title is linked back to the individual build article where performance testing can be validated. Clicking on the Title below will bring you to our complete report on this new Gen 4 PC system.

INTEL Z590 PCIE 4.0 COMPONENTS (Click for System Report)

PC CHASSIS: Corsair 5000X RGB White Tempered Glass Chassis
MOTHERBOARD: ASUS ROG Maximus XIII Z590 Hero Gen 4
CPU: Intel 11th Gen Core i9-11900K
CPU COOLER: Corsair Hydro Series H150i Capellix White
POWER SUPPLY: Corsair RM850x 80Plus White
GRAPHICS: ZOTAC GeForce RTX 3080 Trinity White
MEMORY: Corsair Dominator Platinum RGB DDR4-3200 32GB
STORAGE: Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus Gen 4 4TB NVMe SSD
KEYBOARD: Corsair K70 RGB Mk. 2 SE White Gaming
MOUSE: Corsair M65 RGB Elite FPS Gaming
MONITOR: Samsung 34″ 1440p WQHD Ultrawide Gaming

BENCHMARK SOFTWARE

The software in use for today’s analysis consists of Crystal DiskMark, Anvil Storage Benchmark and TXBench.  We have also conducted some True Data Transfer comparisons to show just how the Rocket XTRM-Q places with the competition and other form factors. Sabrent has also put together a great marketing video for the 16TB Rocket XTRM-Q which can be seen here:

CRYSTAL DISK INFO VER. 8.11.2 X64

Crystal Disk Info is a great tool for displaying the characteristics and health of storage devices. It displays everything from temperatures, the number of hours the device has been powered, and even to the extent of informing you of the firmware of the device.

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Crystal DiskMark identifies both Sabrent 8TBs of our RAID 0 volume individually, however, both belonging to logical drive ‘E:’.  We can see that Tbt 3 requires PCIe 3.0 X4 and that temperature of 44°C is the hottest we could get the unit while transferring data.

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