Hi Jay – How has your experience been with the replacement they sent you? Have you had any more problems? Did they ever tell you what happened to the first drive that made it fail?

It is secured by a screw under the round branding badge which has been stuck there with adhesive.

It gets extraordinarily hot. I had two occasions on which to clone my MacBook Pro’s 8TB SSD to the QTRM-Q. The first occasion resulted in the failure of the drive, whose case reached temperatures as high as 171F. I bought a second XTRM-Q – which, fortunately, seems to work just fine – however case temperatures during large transfers consistently reach ~160F.

Yes, those readings are accurate.

Real world transfers over Thunderbolt 3 max out in the 1900s MB/s, both read and write. For comparison, the 4TB XTRM max out around 2,500 MB/s read, 2,400 MB/s write.

DriveDx reports that the disk does not thermally throttle, and I have not found that transfer speeds are in any way related to heat…. aside from, of course, heat killing the controller. Or whatever happened with my first 8TB XTRM-Q.

The failed drive went back to Sabrent. The exchange was accompanied by an unasked-for and surprisingly generous goodwill gesture by Sabrent, and I asked that they let me know what they find with the failed drive.

We’ll see.