External bus-powered storage gadgets have grown each in storage capability in addition to speeds over the past decade. Thanks to fast developments in flash know-how (together with the appearance of 3D NAND and NVMe) in addition to sooner host interfaces (similar to Thunderbolt Three and USB 3.x), we now have palm-sized flash-based storage gadgets able to delivering 2GBps+ speeds. While these speeds will be achieved with Thunderbolt 3, mass-market gadgets should depend on USB. This evaluate discusses the efficiency and traits of Western Digital’s newest choices (2020 catalog) supporting USB 3.1 Gen 2 (10 Gbps) speeds.
Introduction
High-performance exterior storage gadgets use both Thunderbolt Three or USB 3.2 Gen 2 for the host interface. Traditional SATA SSDs (saturating at 560 MBps) can hardly take full benefit of the bandwidth supplied by USB 3.2 Gen 2. In 2020, we’ve got seen the market transfer en-masse to NVMe SSDs behind a USB 3.2 Gen 2 bridge for this market phase.
Western Digital introduced NVMe assist to their My Passport SSD product line final month. Today, the corporate is launching the SanDisk Extreme Portable SSD v2 (together with the Extreme PRO Portable SSD v2). The Extreme v2 is of explicit curiosity right here, as each the function set and the efficiency specs tally with that of the My Passport SSD. The firm offered us with evaluate samples of the 1TB variations of the My Passport SSD in addition to the SanDisk Extreme Portable SSD v2.
The two merchandise are packaged equally and each include brief (15cm) USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-C to Type-C cables. A Type-C to Type-A adaptor is equipped, much like those with the earlier era exterior SSDs from Western Digital. The industrial design of the models is sort of totally different, every interesting to its personal goal market. The carabiner loop within the SanDisk Extreme / PRO line has proved to be a helpful complement to the gumstick form-factor enforced by the utilization of a M.2 NVMe SSD. It has been significantly appreciated by content material creators (photographers and videographers) on the go. The My Passport SSD with its rounded edges and grooves / availability in a number of colours could maintain attraction to the mainstream style-conscious viewers. As we will see additional down within the ‘Device Features & Characteristics’ part, the interior {hardware} is an identical. The remainder of the evaluate additionally tackles one other attention-grabbing facet – does the identical inside {hardware} result in comparable efficiency profiles for the 2 SSDs?
In this evaluate, we examine the SanDisk Extreme Portable SSD v2 and the WD My Passport SSD (2020) towards one another, in addition to the next DAS models that we’ve got reviewed earlier than.
- ADATA SE800 1TB
- Crucial Portable SSD X8 1TB
- HP P700 1TB
- Lexar SL100 Pro 1TB
- Patriot PXD 1TB
- Samsung Portable SSD T7 Touch 1TB
- SanDisk Extreme Pro Portable SSD 1TB
A fast overview of the interior capabilities of the storage gadgets is given by CrystalDiskInfo.
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The SanDisk Extreme Portable SSD v2 and the WD My Passport SSD (2020) use the identical inside SSD – the Western Digital SN550E. The SN550 is on the market in retail underneath the WD Blue branding. We consider that the ‘E’ suffix stands for ‘External’ – WD did verify that the SSD getting used was SN550-class, and it contained particular firmware tweaks to be used as an exterior SSD. Like virtually each different M.2 NVMe SSD behind a USB 3.2 Gen 2 bridge, the SanDisk Extreme Portable SSD v2 and the WD My Passport SSD (2020) assist S.M.A.R.T. passthrough and TRIM (although it isn’t explicitly evident within the…
