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Western Digital shows off world’s first 8 TB 20 Gbps portable SSD at CES 2020
Western Digital brought a ton of goodies to Vegas this year, including an incredibly fast portable SSD. This pocket-sized SanDisk prototype delivers 20 Gbps transfer speeds and 8 TB of storage. This is pretty intense considering some of the best portable SSDs out there are just breaking 500 Mbps. The prototype’s speed is made possible through a USB SuperSpeed interface, better known as USB 3.2. No word on when (or if) we’ll see this particular unit go up for sale, but an interesting look at what’s possible.
Western Digital didn’t stop there. They also showed off the world’s first 1 TB thumb drive. It has both USB Type-A and Type-C plugs, so you can easily bounce files between your tablet, phone, and PC. With that much storage, you should be able to handle big video files with ease. Expect to see this one on store shelves later this quarter.
The WD_Black lineup of hard drives also got the SuperSpeed USB treatment. The P50 Game Drive SSD also delivers 20 Gbps transfer speeds. Licensed Xbox WD_Black hard drives now offer upwards of 12 TB of storage, in addition including two months of Game Pass Ultimate. With that much room, you’d never have to worry about running out of space again.
(Image credit: Future)
Finally, WD was showing off ibi, a friendly drive for managing your photos. It collects photos from the cloud, lets you organize them via your phone, securely share them to friends and family, and stream your content to smart TVs in the home.
Overall, it was clearly a busy CES for WD. There’s a lot to look forward to from them in 2020!
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So its 2000 megabytes/s? Very fast for an external SSD but still slower than internal NVMe drives.
20 Gigabits / 8 = 2.5 Gigabytes or 2500 Megabytes per second.
PCI-E 3.0 x4 (3940 Megabytes per second without overhead) is indeed faster than 2500 Megabytes per second.
But for transferring files between computers a portable SSD sure beats
Shutdown computer
Open case
Connect drive
Boot up the computer
Transfer files
Shutdown computer
Disconnect drive
Close caseAssuming you were transferring terabytes of data and 10 gigabit Ethernet or faster wasn't available.
Even though 20 gigabits is twice as fast as 10 gigabit Ethernet you would still need to write the data to the SSD and then copy the data from the SSD to the new computer, which is effectively the same time as copying the data once from computer to computer with 10 gigabit Ethernet.
You also have the added downtime of physically moving the portable SSD from computer to computer.
