ADATA Is The First To Release A USB4 External SSD And It's Crazy Fast
by
Thiago Trevisan
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Tuesday, October 31, 2023, 11:21 AM EDT
One of the best upgrades you can do to your PC is undoubtedly adding a faster storage or system drive. We'd surmise that the first time users tried a fast SSD (NVMe or even SATA), they immediately could tell the difference from their slower spinning hard drive. While the internal storage train has brought us to incredible PCIe Gen 5 speeds with the latest NVME drives, the external options have lagged behind.
The gap is slowly closing, with the latest USB4 SE920 SSD from ADATA. Packing a blistering 3,800MB/s, it takes advantage of the incredible speeds offered by the USB4 interface. USB4 and Thunderbolt 4 are ports that have been slowly making their way into higher end motherboards during the last few years, expanding the user base. The real area where users will benefit is in the mobile computing environment, where being able to move around a fast SSD is paramount to one's workflow.
Video content creators will be well aware of needing fast media
While you can certainly slam your Steam library into one of these ultra-fast drives, we'd reckon creative professionals will be the most to benefit. Workflows that incorporate extremely large "Raw" video formats, such as when using R3D Raw, have traditionally relied on fast media to maintain a steady workflow. Many of these users are out in the field, where a mobile SSD is key.
Sure, ideally we'd all be strapped to our desks with a massive RAID or NAS setup, but this isn't always the case. One of the biggest detriments to a fast workflow is in the media bottleneck, needing to unload files and wait for slow transfer speeds. While external SSD drives have been around for a long time, the ADATA USB4 SE920 is unique in many ways.
USB4 can crank all the way up to 40Gbps, which means heat has joined the conversation. ADATA has developed an interesting "Proprietary active dissipation" with an included micro-fan. It can reduce temperatures by as much as 10%, which will be an obvious benefit to a long data transfer session. Thermal throttling is certainly a big issue in storage media, especially when speeds are greatly increased.
Whether noise will be an issue is not yet known, as a micro-fan certainly has the potential to increase the decibel level. The cooling solution is certainly unique, and anything that benefits cooling is welcomed in these type of devices.
External SSDs have been popular for years, now they're getting faster!
Of note is that USB4 drives such as this ADATA SE920 will work with Windows, MacOS, and Android devices. This universal approach is great - giving users the flexibility to use the platform of their choice. ADATA also stipulates that this SSD will work with game consoles, which have typically limited internal storage. While we'd prefer to run games on the internal storage, the ADATA SE920 can serve as a good storage device for your game library - with quick transfer speeds when needed. This will all depend on your particular device supporting USB4, of course. If it doesn't, it will still be compatible but simply run at slower speeds.
