Connectivity stole the show at CES 2024 this year more than any other in recent memory. Wi-Fi 7 is the new standard that crept up in the industry with fast speeds and lower latency. There's also Thunderbolt 5, the latest connectivity standard from Intel that promises double the bandwidth of Thunderbolt 4. Although Wi-Fi 7 is a significant achievement, Thunderbolt 5 is truly an exciting standard that opens up new possibilities for what you can do with external hardware.

Announced in September 2023, the Thunderbolt 5 spec will start shipping on the best laptops this year. We've already seen it appear on Razer's new Blade 18 laptop at CES. While it won't be immediately felt, a perfect storm might be brewing in the PC market that could finally bring external SSDs and GPUs mainstream. Thunderbolt 5 makes it possible to replace internal components with external ones without losing a lot of bandwidth, and non-upgradeable components on modern computers could give users a real reason to go external. Here's why the time is right for Thunderbolt 5 and external hardware to take off.

Thunderbolt 5 doubles transfer speeds

External SSDs will finally be as fast as internal SSDs

A simple reason why Thunderbolt 5 could foster greater adoption of external hardware devices is that the specification can handle more. The current Thunderbolt 4 spec is quite capable, offering 40Gbps of bi-directional bandwidth. You can comfortably use external SSDs and GPUs over Thunderbolt 4. However, the best SSDs will still be limited by the available bandwidth of the current specification.

By comparison, Intel says that Thunderbolt 5 will double the bi-directional bandwidth available, supporting 80Gbps speeds. An even more impressive feat might be the uni-directional bandwidth of Thunderbolt 5, which can reach 120Gbps speeds. For those keeping score, that's triple the available bandwidth of Thunderbolt 4. The unique uni-directional configurations allow for 120Gbps over three lanes in a single direction while still supporting 40Gbps speeds the other way. This is all new to Thunderbolt 5 and has a massive effect on external SSDs and GPUs that require as much bandwidth as they can get.

The newest internal SSDs, using the NVMe protocol, can reach top read/write speeds beyond 10,000 MB/s. These top speeds are always climbing, but the average SSD uses transfer speeds much lower than those figures. With Thunderbolt 5, external drives can beat, match, or near the speeds of many internal SSDs still in use today. Using the Thunderbolt 4 standard, external SSDs max out at an advertised 2,800 MB/s transfer speed. Since the Thunderbolt 5 spec doubles the existing speed, that equates to a maximum speed of 5,600 MB/s.

So, we're getting to a future where you don't have to choose an internal SSD just because it's faster. The absolute best internal SSDs will probably already be faster, but external SSDs are definitely getting into "more than good enough" territory. While SSD speeds are used as an example, eGPUs will receive the same benefits. They'll have to double the bandwidth using Thunderbolt 5 than Thunderbolt 4, making the experience more similar to using a GPU connected straight to the motherboard.

The market is shifting toward external hardware

More soldered components will force users to use external SSDs and GPUs

Increased bandwidth alone isn't enough to make external SSDs and GPUs mainstream under Thunderbolt 5. Some expected the same thing to happen with Thunderbolt 4, which it didn't. However, due to growing trends, the market could be better poised to accept external SSDs and GPUs. That's due to the increasing shift toward non-upgradeable components in the laptop and computer markets, including soldered SSDs and integrated GPUs.

Apple has been soldering the SSDs in its laptops for a while, which means they can't be upgraded by the end-user when space fills up. Plus, getting more storage on the best Macs today costs hundreds of dollars for each storage bump, so most users choose lower configurations. Apple isn't the only company to start doing this, either. Microsoft has shipped products with soldered SSDs in the past, and new Windows laptops based on ARM chips will have integrated GPU cores in the same system-on-chip. All this means that upgrading laptops years after purchase is slowly becoming a thing of the past, even on Windows machines.

Years from now, when modern laptops and PCs with soldered storage and non-upgradeable graphics become outdated, consumers will have two options. They can either buy a whole new computer or use external SSDs and GPUs. I'm inclined to believe that, eventually, people will choose the latter. There's evidence to support this, too: both the external storage market and the external graphics market are projected to grow over the next few years.

Adoption won't be immediate

The effect of Thunderbolt 5 won't be felt until computers reach end-of-life

It's important to note that we won't see the effects of Thunderbolt 5 on the external hardware market for some time. The Razer Blade 18 is the first laptop to feature Thunderbolt 5, and it'll take a bit for more laptops to start shipping with the standard. Then, people will have to start upgrading to Thunderbolt 5 systems, and they'll need to use them long enough to need SSD and GPU upgrades. However, with the lack of upgradeable components in some computers and the impressive speeds of Thunderbolt 5, external SSDs and GPUs could finally become mainstream.