Sandisk arrives running hot to the M.2 2230 SSD segment. A spiritual successor to the popular WD Black SN770M, the Optimus GX 7100M invokes memories of the laptop champion WD Black SN7100 with tested and true hardware. Does the class-leading responsiveness and power efficiency carry over to the smaller factor? Portable gaming system owners can rest easy knowing that it does.

We don’t want to confuse WD and Sandisk here, even if the hardware – and software, for that matter – is similar and often shared. Sandisk is making its own mark, and the Optimus GX 7100M, or 7100M for short, is proof of that. While there were few options available in the M.2 2230 form factor when the Steam Deck launched, there would soon be almost too many. Sandisk didn’t have to release this drive, but we’re glad it did, because it does fill an important hole in the lineup where alternatives have become harder to find.

This is a high-end Gen 4 drive, or as high-end as this segment gets. It’s still DRAM-less but can push the full bandwidth of the interface at both capacities. Where it shines is in its random read performance. That’s the key metric for responsiveness or real-world feel, and especially for game-focused hardware, it means the fastest loading times possible. Portable systems also need to use as little power as possible to reduce heat generation and prolong battery life. The 7100M’s pedigree is great there, too. And while 2TB was once hard to find in this form factor, because drives need to be single-sided with just one NAND flash package, the 7100M handles that and does it with faster TLC rather than lower-endurance QLC flash.

It’s a powerhouse of a product. The reason we say it fills a hole is that the alternatives are hard to find. The Crucial P310 still tends to be a great choice, but the parent company is moving away from the retail space due to AI and enterprise demand. The P310 is also QLC-based, which, while not a big deal anymore, does limit its performance in some cases and means reduced endurance. TLC-based alternatives with Phison’s E27T controller, like the Corsair MP600 Mini, are harder to find and don’t quite match that random read performance. SMI’s competing controller is more often used in budget products, where you can find it, like the Kingston NV3. The 7100M is left as the clear winner if you want the very best – especially if you like its strong software package – with no real drawbacks.

Sandisk Optimus GX 7100M Specifications

M.2 2230 SSDs are generally limited to a small range of capacities, and the Sandisk Optimus GX 7100M is no different. Lower capacities don’t make sense for an upgrade when base models typically come with at least 512GB of storage. Larger capacities, 4TB or more, are difficult to achieve in such a small form factor. The 7100M only being available at 1TB and 2TB, therefore, makes sense. We will add that 4TB is possible with slightly longer M.2 2242 SSDs like the Corsair MP700 Micro and, also, 4TB for 2230 will be possible in the future. Furthermore, if devices were designed for double-sided drives, then all these limits would be effectively doubled. From the other side of things, rising memory and storage costs mean that base units might arrive with less storage, making smaller drives relevant again. It’s a push-pull situation.

At the time of review, the 1TB was going for $229.99 and the 2TB for $449.99. At 1TB, you could get the P310 for a little bit less, but otherwise, you will be giving up performance to save money. Considering the P310 is QLC-based, the 7100M isn’t too badly priced there. At 2TB, the price gap is more significant, as you can get slower alternatives for $50 to $150 less. Unfortunately, maximum performance at 2TB is the holy grail, so paying the premium could be worth it. Right now, it’s $50 or 12.5% over the last-generation WD Black SN770M, for instance, and on paper, that sounds reasonable for a drive that’s faster and more efficient.

Both capacities of the 7100M have the same peak performance level: up to 7,250 / 6,900 MB/s for sequential reads and writes and up to 1,000K / 1,300K random read and write IOPS. Both sets of numbers are excellent for a drive in this form factor, and the drive even exceeds what the Phison E27T-based Corsair MP600 Mini can achieve. This is top-tier performance for this segment and a full notch above the WD Black SN770M and effectively matches the 7100M’s forebear, the WD Black SN7100. While the Black SN7100 did not particularly stand out for us with its performance, its power efficiency is fantastic. That bodes well for the 7100M.

SanDisk has the drive pulling 4W or less under typical workloads, which puts the drive into a good spot for mobile devices. We test with a mixed workload, which can push a drive a little bit harder than this. Either way, this isn’t a lot of power for a full-fledged Gen 4 device – the drive’s 7,250 MB/s is near the limits of the interface – so we can expect good power efficiency.

Sandisk backs the drive with the standard 5-year, 600TB of writes per TB warranty. The drive supports the TCG Pyrite 2.01 specification and only has software encryption. This is perfectly normal for a drive of this type. The TBW is, however, higher with TLC versus QLC flash.

Sandisk Optimus GX 7100M Software and Accessories

Sandisk has you covered with its software. The Sandisk Desktop App, which works on Windows and macOS, is useful for general file transfer and password protection – software encryption, as well. The Sandisk Dashboard is Sandisk’s take on WD’s Dashboard, an SSD toolbox application with a wide range of features. An SSD toolbox like this gives you information on your system and drives, including SMART and health information. It lets you test and benchmark the drive. Importantly, this software also helps you update the firmware, if necessary, and use other features such as Game Mode. Sandisk also offers an Acronis True Image download, which is great for backing up files and your OS or for cloning drives.

Sandisk Optimus GX 7100M: A Closer Look

The 2TB Optimus GX 7100M is a single-sided drive, optimized for device compatibility. This does limit it to a single NAND flash package, which puts a cap at 2TB. This is because the most common dies widely available are 1Tb, or 128GB, apiece, and typically a single package – which has to stack the dies on top of each other, might have dummy dies for stability, and has to carefully maintain signal quality without exceeding height limitations – can only hit sixteen dies.

According to the specification sheet, this drive uses the M.2 2230-S3-M form factor. The M.2 format is easily recognizable as the way consumer SSDs are made these days, in contrast to the old 2.5” SATA drives. Other form factors meet the needs of the enterprise. 2230 tells us the length and width in millimeters. This is a common size for portable devices like the Steam Deck, the Asus ROG Ally, and the Lenovo Legion Go. The “M” part means it’s M-key, which we expect these days as NVMe drives using a full four lanes are common. Some drives can drop back to two lanes, like the Samsung 990 EVO and Samsung 990 EVO Plus, but are still capable of using four.

The “S3” is the part we’re looking for here, which tells us it’s single-sided rather than double-sided with a “D.” The number tells us the permitted height of the components. S1 allows for 1.2mm, S2 1.35mm, and S3 1.5mm. We would expect this drive to be S3 since it needs to pack in sixteen dies. The nominal PCB thickness for M.2 is 0.8mm, so this puts the drive at ~2.3mm, and the datasheet lists 2.38mm. This isn’t too interesting on its own, but it could be useful if you know the exact limitations of your device or need to make other measurements, such as for custom cooling. Some devices can take double-sided devices, which, as you can imagine, have similar height thresholds but with components on both sides.

One other interesting thing is the rated power: 3.3V at 1.8A puts the peak power around 6W. This is well higher than the specification sheet, which, again, is for average and also with read and write separately rather than mixed, as well as what’s listed by SMART and in our testing. We reckon this drive will always be below 5W, which normally would ensure there won’t be any heat issues. For M.2 2280, that’s broadly true, but heat is always an issue for 2230.

In addition to the sole NAND flash package, the drive also has a DRAM-less SSD controller and power management circuitry. The controller is proprietary Sandisk technology, listed as the A101-000171-A1. Similar to the WD Black SN7100's A101-000172-A1, which is a four-channel controller that can take fast enough flash to saturate PCIe 4.0. We would expect the drives to share the same flash, too, which would be Sandisk’s 218-Layer TLC. BiCS8 flash, whether TLC or QLC, has proven to have fantastic random read latency and also excellent power efficiency. This makes it great for the M.2 2230 segment.

The 7100M is still DRAM-less, as it can be difficult to make a DRAM package work in this form factor. In the past, it was not uncommon to see DRAM at least in M.2 2242, but modern host memory buffer (HMB) solutions are quite good. A quick look at the random 4KB results for this drive will dispel any illusions that you need DRAM to make a drive feel fast. In fact, it’s very unlikely DRAM would ever make a difference in the type of device this drive is made for, although there are always exceptions. Yes, there are some odd drives that have DRAM as part of the controller package – SK hynix’s BC711 comes to mind –, but these are rare and relegated to the Gen 3 era. An OEM Gen 3 drive is perfectly enough for a Steam Deck, but we’re in the business of gauging modern retail options.

The older Black SN770M, which is a retail version of the OEM SN740 – an extremely popular drive when the Steam Deck was still young – and a shortened version of the Black SN770, struggled with power efficiency. At least, in comparison to some of the newer 2230 drives on the block. With that problem out of the way, thanks to more efficient flash, the 7100M might very well be the best drive of its type available. We certainly think so, but knowing the pedigree of the hardware can help explain why this is.

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Comparison Products

The Sandisk Optimus GX 7100M is slated to be the top for M.2 2230 SSDs, so we are putting it up against our best drives. These include the Crucial P310, which, despite being QLC-based, is the fastest all-around 2230 drive up to this point, and the Corsair MP600 Mini with the Phison E27T. The Phison E27T controller, when paired with TLC flash, as is the case with the Corsair drive, is about as fast as you can get, but more importantly, it has the advantages of TLC. This means more consistent performance and better endurance. The Optimus GX 7100M, also with TLC flash, is therefore the ultimate challenger.

For other hardware, we have the Kingston NV3 that uses a comparable SMI controller. We have an SMI controller in the Lexar Play, too, although at a lower speed. The 7100M’s predecessor, the WD Black SN770M, is also in play. This drive and its OEM counterpart became popular picks after the Steam Deck came out, offering, at the time, the best performance possible at the cost of higher power consumption. Alternatives here generally use the Phison E21T controller with various TLC and QLC flash choices. These include the Silicon Power UD90, the Sabrent Rocket Q4, and the Teamgroup MP44S.

Trace Testing — 3DMark Storage Benchmark

Built for gamers, 3DMark’s Storage Benchmark focuses on real-world gaming performance. Each round in this benchmark stresses storage based on gaming activities, including loading games, saving progress, installing game files, and recording gameplay video streams. Future gaming benchmarks will be DirectStorage-inclusive, and an evaluation for future-proofing is included where applicable.

If you’re buying an M.2 2230 SSD, you’re probably buying it for gaming. Yes, there are productivity machines with small form factor SSDs, and you could buy this drive and use it with an extender for a random system, but gaming is the one place it has to do well. Frankly, we’re impressed with how well the 7100M does here. It’s second only to the P310 and is first among TLC-based drives. Beating the TLC-equipped, E27T-based MP600 Mini is an accomplishment. This drive will be very responsive for gaming, and we’d even put it above the P310 for that, in fact. This is because the P310 is using QLC flash – with a fuller drive, with a lifetime of transfers and wear, it should suffer more, meaning you’d pick the 7100M for peace of mind. At the very least, it’s a deciding point if the prices are close.

As a side note, this drive is supported by the Sandisk Dashboard and, as such, has the Game Mode feature. This mode works by disabling the drive’s idle power states, improving responsiveness. This can slightly improve game loading times. The Dashboard is designed for Windows.

Trace Testing — PCMark 10 Storage Benchmark

PCMark 10 is an industry standard trace-based benchmark that uses a wide-ranging set of real-world traces from popular applications and everyday tasks to measure the performance of storage devices. The results are particularly useful when analyzing drives for their use as primary/boot storage devices and in work environments.

The 7100M proves to be great at productivity, too, more or less tied for first in PCMark 10 with the P310. Our QLC caveat applies again: all else being equal, you’d probably pick the TLC 7100M over the P310. We want to emphasize that there are many good DRAM-less drives that can get near this performance level, but you don’t see that hardware in this form factor. For example, we don’t see the Maxio MAP1602 controller here, for a variety of reasons. That controller does tend to run hot, for one thing, and that’s always a looming concern for this form factor. We also don’t see much from SMI, and when we do, it’s usually for budget drives. This reduces the amount of direct resistance to the 7100M.

Phison exists, but the E21T and controllers of that class were and remain much more present in this form factor. That’s partly because the M.2 2230 form factor took off around the same time that such drive technology came out, and now we have a very uncomfortable memory market. Also, the Steam Deck is PCIe 3.0, so you only need so much performance for the most popular destination device. Even with 4.0 devices, a 5 GB/s drive is plenty of performance for a portable system. That means that a drive like the 7100M has less direct competition than you might expect if we’re talking about performance. It’s nearly peerless, in fact. If that’s what you want, then this drive should be at the very top of your list.

Steam Deck Testing — Gaming, KDiskMark, and Temperature

The Steam Deck is not the only portable gaming system in town, but it was the first and most popular to take M.2 2230 SSDs. While some systems have moved on to fit 2280-length drives, 2230 remains popular for many systems, and such drives will work fine in longer slots with the proper standoff or extender. The Deck operates in PCIe 3.0 mode for its SSD, limiting maximum bandwidth, but that has less of an impact on responsiveness/latency, and the Deck is still useful for gauging drive temperature and power efficiency.

Our current testing for the Deck involves analyzing game load times for some popular games. This is probably the most important metric for gamers, but the difference between one SSD and another can be small. We also use KDiskMark, a CrystalDiskMark-like substitute that uses the flexible I/O (FIO) tester instead of diskspd for its underlying benchmarks. We also check the drive’s maximum temperature during this test.

The tests in this section are run under the stock Arch-based SteamOS Linux platform, but our other tests are conducted as per our normal reviews, using Windows. Many portable gaming systems today use or can use Windows with multi-boot as an option. This testing section is instead designed to give an idea of Linux performance, which does involve the use of Proton.

The 7100M does well in all of this testing and runs relatively cool, too. We specifically want to point out its excellent random read performance at QD1, a metric that most readily correlates with responsiveness or “feel.” The P310 pulls away at a higher queue depth, but this is mostly not relevant to what this drive needs to do. We’d say the 7100M’s biggest weak point is the QD1 sequential read speed, merely good but significantly below the P310’s. Many apps and games have low QD sequential reads for loading, and it’s possible the P310 will be slightly quicker for some titles. The magnitude of this, on average, across apps and games will likely be tiny, to say the least, and further, we think that a fuller and realistically worn drive might favor the TLC-based 7100M in the long term. Then again, you probably won’t be fully wearing out any drive in a portable gaming system. We’d probably focus more on heat and power draw, which we address further below.

We do want to point out that QD1 sequential read performance is excellent in our CrystalDiskMark test below. KDiskMark is running on Linux and is built on FIO, which is a different I/O stack. Additionally, on the Deck, we’re testing drives only at PCIe 3.0 speeds. Furthermore, in some cases, weak CPUs – and this applies to many APUs – as well as different platforms, can impact storage performance results. If your portable device is running on something more modern with Windows and PCIe 4.0, it’s quite possible your results will align more with CDM.

Transfer Rates — DiskBench

We use the DiskBench storage benchmarking tool to test file transfer performance with a custom 50GB dataset. We write 31,227 files of various types, such as pictures, PDFs, and videos to the test drive, then make a copy of that data to a new folder, and follow up with a reading test of a newly-written 6.5GB zip file. This is a real-world type workload that fits into the cache of most drives.

The 7100M delivers the highest copy rate in DiskBench, along with the highest read transfer rate. In a portable device, such as one that would take a primary M.2 2230 drive, you often don’t have a lot of fast transfer sources. You might have only a 10Gbps external drive, a relatively slow microSD card, and so forth. Copying on the same drive still occurs with updates and other procedures, and you are essentially relying on a single drive to manage most things on the system. For this reason, the DiskBench results are still useful for gauging how well a drive can manage mixed workloads. The 7100M handles that like a champ, and the high read performance – considering you do a lot of reads – is also a bonus.

The only anomaly here is the write speed, which was also a bit low in our previous Steam Deck test section. Write performance can be misleading for many reasons. Most pertinently, modern drives use pSLC caching, which can “hide” the true performance of the native flash. This can mean performance is not always consistent. Manufacturers can optimize the drive firmware with this in mind, making trade-offs such as varying the cache size to improve sustained performance. Drives ultimately have to move data over from the cache to the native flash, so test results don’t always align with expectations. To get a fuller idea of write performance, you should check our Write Saturation section.

Synthetic Testing — ATTO / CrystalDiskMark

ATTO and CrystalDiskMark (CDM) are free and easy-to-use storage benchmarking tools that SSD vendors commonly use to assign performance specifications to their products. Both of these tools give us insight into how each device handles different file sizes and at different queue depths for both sequential and random workloads.

The first signs of weakness on this drive appear in ATTO, but things are not as bad as they first appear. We’re talking about read performance, and when looking at our logarithmic chart, the jumps up and down don’t seem as bad. While throttling could affect this test, generally, that’s not the case. It helps that we see the same pattern with the WD Black SN7100, as we can rule out any randomness.

However, we don’t see it with the WD Blue SN5100, which uses BiCS8 QLC and a comparable controller, so this is probably a feature of BiCS8 TLC. We also don’t see it on the WD Black SN8100 or Corsair MP700 Pro XT, drives with that flash but controllers from SMI and Phison, respectively, so it’s not the flash on its own, either. Given the drops are at 64KiB and 256KiB – with 16KiB pages, this is with 4-way and 16-way interleaving, which aligns both with the flash channel count and the four-plane count dies – it’s likely an artifact of how the proprietary controller manages the reads. Sandisk has some interesting optimization going on, which you can see most clearly with random reads and power efficiency, so we don’t want to jump to conclusions, especially as long as real-world performance remains strong.

Thankfully, it does. The 7100M has incredibly low 4KB random read latency at QD1 in CDM, blowing away the rest of the 2230 drives. As we pointed out above, the competition here is more limited in comparison to full-length drives, which helps the 7100M stand out even more. In many cases, you could look only at this result and be convinced that this is the drive to get. However, as we’ve stated in the past, a good rule of thumb is ~45µs if you want a top-notch experience, and other drives hit that. The 7100M just takes it to a new level.

Sequential read performance at QD1 is also very important; in fact, it is sometimes overlooked with regard to game and app load times. It often deserves to be weighted alongside random 4KB. Luckily, the 7100M is tops here, too. WD and Sandisk have this mastered, as the SN770M is a monster as well. Given that the 7100M can push even more bandwidth with efficient flash, just chef’s kiss.

Sustained Write Performance and Cache Recovery

Official write specifications are only part of the performance picture. Most SSDs implement a write cache, which is a fast area of pseudo-SLC (single-bit) programmed flash that absorbs incoming data. Sustained write speeds can suffer tremendously once the workload spills outside of the cache and into the "native" TLC (three-bit) or QLC (four-bit) flash. Performance can suffer even more if the drive is forced to fold, the process of migrating data out of the cache in order to free up space for further incoming data.

We use Iometer to hammer the SSD with sequential writes for 15 minutes to measure both the size of the write cache and performance after the cache is saturated. We also monitor cache recovery via multiple idle rounds. This process shows the performance of the drive in various states including the steady state write performance.

Modern drives tend to write in three states: the pSLC cache, direct to the native flash, and in a folding mode. The first mode is temporary and fast, converting native flash into single-bit mode to trade capacity for speed. When space gets tight, the drive can choose to write straight to the flash. This is slower and can be worse for endurance in some cases. When space is completely exhausted, the drive is forced to wait for data to go through the pSLC cache and be “folded” over to the native flash, is far slower and decreases drive consistency and responsiveness. Most of the time, you want to be in the cache, especially with an M.2 2230 drive, but it’s worth seeing how the drive might behave if it’s left in a fuller state after sustaining writes.

How the pSLC cache is handled varies from drive to drive. A larger cache can handle larger bursts of traffic, but this can leave the drive more vulnerable in some cases. A smaller cache can result in more consistent drive performance. There are also two types of pSLC cache, static and dynamic, with different characteristics. Generally speaking, the static portion is always available, while the dynamic portion is altered with the amount of free space. Proprietary solutions such as Samsung’s TurboWrite and WD’s or Sandisk’s nCache – with nCache 4.0 on this drive – use both types in tandem.

WD’s and Sandisk’s most recent drives have opted for larger caches. This is also true for Samsung, which, with the Samsung 990, has significantly increased the size of the cache. In the 7100M’s case, the cache takes up almost the entire drive. The drive wrote at over 6.4 GB/s for 110 seconds, implying a ~708GB cache. With three bits in TLC needed per pSLC bit, this is quite large for a 2TB drive, although there is a little free space, which helps keep the drive from flatlining completely. Instead, the drive is able to maintain a middle mode around 2.9 GB/s for a small amount of time, which is, honestly, quite fast for such a mode. In most cases, this would be an adequate cushion.

After that, the drive oscillates when hitting the folding mode. Performance is much less consistent as space is periodically freed. We see an actual peak of around 1,450 MB/s here, which is about half of that 2.9 GB/s. This is a common ratio because when you’re folding, you’re essentially writing twice. However, the controller is juggling many things as it is attempting to remain responsive to incoming I/O while moving data in the background. Therefore, performance dips further with a bottom closer to 500 MB/s or so. Over time, this gives us an average of 894 MB/s, which isn’t too bad. By all standards, it’s better than any QLC-based drive and is respectable for a TLC drive with such a large cache.

Power Consumption and Temperature

We use the Quarch HD Programmable Power Module to gain a deeper understanding of power characteristics. Idle power consumption is an important aspect to consider, especially if you're looking for a laptop upgrade, as even the best ultrabooks can have mediocre stock storage in terms of capacity and performance. Desktops are often more performance-oriented with less support for power-saving features, so we show the worst-case scenario for idle.

Some SSDs can consume watts of power at idle while better-suited ones sip just milliwatts. Average workload power consumption and max consumption are two other aspects of power consumption, but performance-per-watt, or efficiency, is more important. A drive might consume more power during any given workload, but accomplishing a task faster allows the drive to drop into an idle state more quickly, ultimately saving energy.

For temperature recording, we currently poll the drive’s primary composite sensor during testing with a ~22°C ambient. Our testing is rigorous enough to heat the drive to a realistic ceiling temperature, but real-world temperatures will vary due to the environment and workload factors.

The 7100M does not disappoint in power efficiency. It’s the most power-efficient drive on this list and the most power-efficient M.2 2230 SSD that we’ve tested. We feel like anything over about 500 MB/s per watt is good enough for this segment, but getting above that into the P310 or NV3 range is better. It’s hard to argue with this result.

Drives can have multiple sensors for different things. Temperatures can be reported for the flash memory, the DRAM if present, the PMIC, and the controller. Typically, these values are not super accurate and certainly will be different from directly measured temperatures, as often they are a composite. This essentially means the drive reports a general temperature measured against a range for throttling.

Measured temperatures from the 7100M’s sensors came in at 73°C, 76°C, and 85°C for peak readings. The drive is rated to throttle at 90°C with a critical temperature of 94°C. Generally, we like to have at least 10°C of headroom and preferably twice that. So, the numbers here do give us pause, but they can be explained. If we compare the P310, for example, we have another very efficient drive that, in our testing, got within 5 degrees of throttling. The reason is simple: this short form factor has all the hardware pressed together. It’s hard to get around that fact, and it’s very common for 2230 drives to throttle or overheat in portable devices, especially when traveling in warmer climates. You usually have little to no cooling right next to a maxed-out APU, after all.

Another consideration is the workload. You’re unlikely to have sustained writes of the type we’re doing. If you’re on a Steam Deck or an older device, you’re also going to be running in PCIe 3.0 mode. Drives will run much cooler in that mode or with everyday workloads. To add to that, these temperatures don’t reflect actual internal ones or the real limits of the hardware. You should not assume that high temps like this mean the drive won’t have a long lifespan, especially since your host device will likely spend most of its time sleeping.

That said, we do recommend you treat your drive well. If it is at all possible to improve cooling – and this could be a simple matter of adding some thermal interface material or a low-profile heatsink – then you should consider it. Avoid breaking warranties, of course. A good example of what we’re talking about is the Apple MacBook Neo. The main chip on it runs notoriously hot, and DIYers have shown that even adding just some thermal padding can significantly improve performance. The chip still throttles, though. This is the reality of portable devices like this, and thankfully, your SSD won’t be running full blast like an APU any time soon. So we don’t think this is a major drawback of the 7100M – it’s just difficult to escape – but you should be aware that top-tier Gen 4 performance comes at a cost.

Test Bench and Testing Notes

We use an Alder Lake platform with most background applications, such as indexing, Windows updates, and anti-virus, disabled in the OS to reduce run-to-run variability. Each SSD is prefilled to 50% capacity and tested as a secondary device. Unless noted, we use active cooling for all SSDs.

Sandisk Optimus GX 7100M Bottom Line

The Sandisk Optimus GX 7100M is, in a word, fantastic. Anyone who loved the WD Black SN7100 as a proper successor to the WD Black SN770, especially for its class-leading random read performance and power efficiency, can now get that in M.2 2230. The Black SN7100 has been the best SSD for laptops, and now smaller portable devices can enjoy new levels of storage comfort, too.

The 7100M doesn’t disappoint with high levels of performance across-the-board and excellent power efficiency. It’s not always the fastest, but it’s very fast where it matters and doesn’t have the power consumption issue of the previous WD Black SN770M. Even though these drives usually end up on a Linux machine such as the Steam Deck with SteamOS, Sandisk’s excellent Windows software suite is a cherry on top if you’re working with that OS, are multi-booting, or need to work with the drive on your main Windows PC. The drive is also great for enclosures, particularly ones for M.2 2230 drives, and you can extend this drive with an M.2 extender accessory for other slots. It’s just a solid product, no matter what.

The drive lacks a full capacity range of SKUs, but we can’t hold that against it. Higher capacities cannot be achieved without going double-sided or up to M.2 2242. Lower capacities have generally been less desirable, and performance would be lower, too. It wouldn’t be the first time a new 2230 model was limited to 1TB, but Sandisk is going for 2TB out of the gate. Sandisk opted for the two most popular capacities, and performance is stellar for both. Power consumption is also low for both, which is useful for the battery-limited target devices for the drive. It’s really hard to find fault here.

Although it’s not easy to find downsides to this drive, we do feel there are enough drawbacks to prevent it from getting a perfect score. We feel the pricing isn’t too far out there given the current market, and that aside, we’re then looking at performance and cooling. Performance is not always consistent across our tests, and while Sandisk’s pSLC optimization makes sense within the greater product stack, they could have taken a cue from Phison and been more conservative with it. There are people who will want to use this drive in fast enclosures, and having more consistent, sustained writes could help them. But this is a nitpick.

Of more concern is the heat output of the drive, which, to be fair, is also not really Sandisk’s fault. This level of performance in a tight package is going to put out some heat. Because the drive has to fit in a range of devices, Sandisk can’t really throw on a heatsink or anything like that. The drive will be fine in any Gen 3 device and, hopefully, any properly designed Gen 4 device. Alternative drives do not necessarily offer any advantage over the 7100M here, either. Nevertheless, we’ve seen from newer controller designs like the Phison E31T that you could probably do better in this form factor. Sandisk is using existing technology from its stack, and that makes the most financial sense, but that also leaves in our mind the knowledge that a better product could exist.

We’d say that’s quite complimentary to Sandisk, considering the 7100M is the best M.2 2230 drive on the market. If you’re looking for the best 2230 drive, this is it. Your experience is going to be fantastic in every way – fast load times, good power consumption levels, and software support with True Image and a respected toolbox if you need it. You will pay a premium for it, but particularly for an enthusiast Gen 4 device, this is well worth it. On the other hand, your device might come with a fast, capacious drive, so you wouldn’t be looking at the 7100M, anyway. If you’re on the budget end of things, you can save money here, too. Any of the other 2230 drives on the list will probably be sufficient in that case. The 7100M is an investment, but a sound one, and we can highly recommend it.

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Kioxia and Sandisk used the ongoing Future of Memory and Storage Conference to formally introduce their latest BiCS10 3D QLC NAND device, which features the world's highest areal density and is aimed at high-capacity data center-grade solid-state drives that are meant to maximize storage density in data centers. The new IC comes at the step of Kioxia's and Sandisk's BiCS 3D TLC NAND device that offers an areal density of over 29 Gb/mm².

Kioxia's and Sandisk's BiCS10 3D QLC NAND device introduced at FMS features an areal density of 37 Gb/mm², which makes it the world's densest 3D NAND storage device formally introduced to date. The device features 332 active layers as well as an up to 4,800 MT/s interface with a separate command address (SCA) capability, but the manufacturers do not disclose the actual capacity of the IC. Typically, assuming the same number of memory cells and roughly the same die size as the 1Tb BiCS10 3D TLC NAND chip introduced last month, the new memory device should have a capacity of 1.33 Tb, though we are speculating.

The new BiCS10 3D QLC NAND flash IC with record storage density is aimed at data center-grade SSDs that must offer both high-capacity and decent performance enabled by high-speed I/O of flash memory. Since such applications also strive to reduce power consumption, Kioxia and Sandisk also implemented their power-isolated low-tapped termination (PI-LTT) technique designed to reduce the power consumed by high-speed output drivers without sacrificing signal integrity.

Since Kioxia and Sandisk produce their BiCS10 3D QLC NAND device using their latest BiCS10 process technology, they not only achieve the record bit density, but also lower costs compared to competing high-density 3D QLC NAND ICs once their yields reach target levels. As a result, the two companies will be able to offer ultra-high-capacity SSDs at prices that are lower compared to those of rivals, or get higher margins while selling at similar prices.

"By redefining the performance and efficiency envelope of QLC NAND, our 10^th Generation BiCS QLC 3D flash memory delivers simultaneous gains in density, bandwidth, and energy efficiency and establishes a new paradigm for high‑capacity flash storage to provide a scalable foundation for next‑generation infrastructure applications," said Alper Ilkbahar, chief technology officer at Sandisk.

Kioxia and Sandisk intend to use their BiCS10 3D NAND devices primarily for data center-grade storage (read: AI-oriented SSDs that need capacity and performance), so it remains to be seen whether we are going to see such ICs on client SSDs any time soon.

Sandisk and SK hynix on Tuesday formally introduced the High Bandwidth Flash (HBF) specification, their jointly developed storage technology that promises to bring together the non-volatility of 3D NAND and the performance of High Bandwidth Memory (HBM), which will be handy for AI inference systems. The specification was released through the Open Compute Project (OCP), so it will be an open standard rather than a proprietary interface.

The initial specification defines HBF packages with capacities of up to 512GB using either 8-Hi or 16-Hi NAND die stacks, though these will not be standard 3D NAND stacks, but rather specialized devices with a fast interface. In fact, Sandisk once called them HBF core dies rather than 3D NAND die stacks.

Performance of HBF is divided into three bandwidth grades ranging from approximately 0.4 TB/s to 3.0 TB/s (though we are not sure whether this figure describes the full HBF subsystem or per-package bandwidth). Such a huge performance range implies that Sandisk and SK hynix expect HBF to have a multi-year roadmap featuring multiple implementations and generations of HBF. It is noteworthy that the most capable implementation of HBF (3 TB/s) is set to beat the memory bandwidth of a single HBM4 memory stack (2 TB/s), though it will be unlikely to beat HBM4 when it comes to latency.

Interestingly, SK hynix claims that HBF uses the Universal Chiplet Interconnect Express (UCIe) standard to simplify integration with heterogeneous computing platforms, whereas Sandisk claims that HBF is set to adopt the 'xPU-HBF' interface, which could be its definition of UCIe implemented by companies like Broadcom or Marvell.

In addition to capacity and performance targets, the specification establishes electrical and interface characteristics, packaging and reliability guidelines for stacked HBF devices, as well as software I/O requirements. For now, these specifications are not officially published by the OCP.

Extracting 400 GB/s of bandwidth from a single 512GB HBF package is not a trivial task. To enable such a package, Sandisk once planned to use 16 HBF core dies that feature many, many arrays that can be accessed concurrently using dedicated read/write paths. Meanwhile, it is possible to reach over 400 GB/s of bandwidth per package using a single UCIe interface that runs at up to 64 GT/s and features 64 lanes. Yet, this means that the HBF base die will be a fairly complex piece of silicon.

Sandisk and SK hynix position HBF as a new memory tier for AI inference workloads by combining near-memory bandwidth with the higher capacity and non-volatility of NAND flash. The technology is aimed at workloads that require substantially larger memory pools close to compute than HBM alone can economically provide. For example, while the maximum capacity of an HBM4 stack is 64GB, an HBF stack can provide up to 512GB. Even at a lower bandwidth, such memory can be useful for inference workloads.

Arguably the biggest question about HBF is who is going to adopt the technology? Since Sandisk and SK hynix announced plans to collaborate on defining the HBF specification in 2025, only Google and Tenstorrent have expressed interest in participating in the HBF consortium. Meanwhile, AMD, Broadcom, Intel, Nvidia, Marvell, Micron, Qualcomm, Samsung, and Western Digital have so far expressed no interest in HBF.

Kioxia and Sandisk last week said they had started sampling of their latest 3D NAND memory with 332 active layers that features a combination of the industry's leading areal density and performance. The new 10th Generation BiCS 3D TLC NAND is set to address density and performance-sensitive data center applications, as well as promises to surpass Samsung’s latest V10-class 3D NAND in terms of storage density.

Unlike the previous generations, 10th Generation BiCS (BiCS10) is explicitly aimed at data center-grade storage, where bit density and performance are more important than cost. Indeed, the new type of memory features a 332-layer active layer architecture, greater than 29 Gb/mm² density, and a 4,800 MT/s data transfer rate to enable extreme performance for data center solid-state drives featuring PCIe 5.0 and 6.0 interfaces. Kioxia and Sandisk plan to offer BiCS9 NAND specifically for client applications.

When we normally describe 3D NAND memory, we usually mention all possible applications, which include high-end consumer SSDs (after all, we are Tom's Hardware, we are hardware enthusiasts!) and data center drives. We did not mention consumer applications for BiCS10 for a very specific reason: Kioxia does not position this generation for client devices and only targets data center-grade drives. Whether or not to expect BiCS10 on a high-performance SSD near you probably depends on supply and demand, given the current market circumstances.

While the BiCS10 332-layer 3D NAND boosts bit density by 59% all the way to over 29 Gb/mm², it also promises to deliver meaningful performance and efficiency gains specifically for enterprise applications. Kioxia claims read latency drops by around 4 microseconds (about 10%), while read energy consumption is reduced by 25%, from roughly 100 mJ/GB to approximately 75 mJ/GB.

According to Kioxia, these improvements stem from a redesigned read scheme that changes how unselected word lines behave during consecutive read operations. In a 332-layer NAND stack, a significant portion of read latency and power consumption is associated with repeatedly charging long word lines from ground (VSS) to the read voltage (VREAD).

Normally, NAND memory discharges its wordlines to ground (VSS) after every read, which is a general-purpose approach that works regardless of what the next operation is. However, there is no need to discharge at all times. Therefore, during continuous read operations, the word lines are not fully discharged in the case of BiCS10. Instead, they are lowered to an intermediate voltage and then raised back to VREAD for the next read, which makes a lot of sense for read-heavy applications (most cloud applications are).

After the initial read, the circuitry reduces the word-line voltage only to an intermediate level instead of completely discharging it to VSS. Before the next access, the voltage is restored to VREAD from that intermediate level rather than from ground. Since the voltage excursion is considerably smaller, the word lines recharge more quickly and require less current, which improves both read latency and energy efficiency. The approach is particularly beneficial for very tall 3D NAND stacks, where long word lines amplify charging delays and power losses during sustained sequential read workloads.

It is interesting to note that Kioxia and Sandisk plan to manufacture their BiCS9 and BiCS10 3D NAND products at different production sites. The newest Fab 2 facility in Kitakami, Iwate Prefecture, will handle production of the flagship 332-layer BiCS10 memory, while the long-established Yokkaichi complex in Mie Prefecture will continue manufacturing the 218-layer BiCS9 generation.

This manufacturing split makes a lot of sense. Fab 2 is equipped with Kioxia’s most advanced production tools, so it is better suited to manufacture the highest-density NAND from Kioxia and Sandisk. Meanwhile, the mature Yokkaichi fabs are well-suited for client-oriented BiCS9 production. The manufacturing facility has largely been depreciated, which enables the company to manufacture mainstream NAND at lower cost and reserve its newest capacity in Kitakami for leading-edge products.

What we have today is the WD Black SN8100 by another name, with one very important and exciting change: it’s 8TB. This puts the SanDisk Optimus GX Pro 8100 on an entirely different plane, as it delivers a capacity everyone wants with insanely fast hardware. The 2TB Black SN8100 that we reviewed previously was a pleasant surprise given its high power efficiency, but its absurdly low random read latency remains the real draw. Can all this goodness be repeated at 8TB with a new SKU firmly under the SanDisk name? And will anyone be able to afford it?

The previous 8TB champion, the WD Black SN850X, still remains interesting from a value perspective – if you can call current prices a value in any circumstance – but we’ve had a hard time finding high-end PCIe 5.0 drives at this capacity. The only one we’ve reviewed is the 8TB Samsung 9100 Pro, which, if you missed it when it was on sale, is probably promoting a stinging sensation right now. We’ve been promised an 8TB SKU of the Kingston Fury Renegade G5 – which has the same hardware as the Black SN8100 and Optimus GX Pro 8100 – and 8TB versions of Phison E28 drives, too. So far, these promises haven't materialized. The good news is, if you like the Optimus GX Pro 8100 at 8TB, then you can pick it up in its Black SN8100 form if that happens to be the better bargain.

Whether or not it’s a deal at all is up to you, but it’s hard to beat this level of performance at 8TB. The drive is power-efficient, too, and we have some faith in WD’s and SanDisk’s reliability and willingness to offer support. It’s probably best to buy something you know than roll the dice with unknown hardware, even if the latter comes with some price savings. We think the Optimus GX Pro 8100 qualifies as a better-known option, and given the level of investment at 8TB, that’s the safest way to go, even if there were other options.

SanDisk Optimus GX Pro 8100 Specifications

The SanDisk Optimus GX Pro 8100 is available in the same capacities as the WD Black SN8100: 1TB, 2TB, 4TB, and 8TB. At the time of our Black SN8100 review, the 8TB model was not available, but it is now.

The current price disparity is worth a mention. The Optimus GX Pro 8100 is, right now, priced at $349.99, $694.63, $1,339.99, and $2,799.99. This is significantly higher than the Black SN8100’s $259.99, $439.99, $789.99, and $1,799.99. These prices are without heatsinks – check the table for the Optimus GX Pro 8100’s heatsink price per SKU, which only makes sense at 1TB, as is the case with the Black SN8100. You’re better off providing your own heatsink in most cases, and going for the Black SN8100 instead of the Optimus GX Pro 8100 makes sense until the price of the latter comes down to reality. Alternatives in this price range include the Kingston Fury Renegade G5 and the Samsung 9100 Pro, both of which also have 8TB SKUs, although we’ve only reviewed the latter at that capacity.

The drive’s maximum performance is impressive, with bandwidth up to 14,900 / 14,000 MB/s for sequential reads and writes and up to 2,300K / 2,400K random read and write IOPS. This is about as good as it gets. This level of performance is, on average, attainable with less than 7W of power consumption – a far cry from the 11.5W+ we saw on the earliest high-end PCIe 5.0 SSDs – which makes the drive even more impressive.

SanDisk includes support for TCG Opal 2.02 for encryption. In addition, the drive is backed up to 600TB of writes per TB of capacity within the five-year warranty period. This is standard and comes out to 4,800TB or 4.8PB of writes for the 8TB sample we have today.

SanDisk Optimus GX Pro 8100 Software and Accessories

SanDisk features two pieces of software for the Optimus GX Pro 8100: the SanDisk Dashboard, based on WD’s Dashboard, and Acronis True Image for SanDisk. Both applications support other products, and SanDisk also has other software that applies to other products, so check the Software Downloads page if you own a different drive. While the OEM Acronis package has obvious applications – it’s for backing up, cloning, and recovering files – the Dashboard may be more involved for the average user. This SSD toolbox helps you stay on top of your drive’s health, it covers optional features, allows you to update the firmware, and more.

SanDisk Optimus GX Pro 8100: A Closer Look

The 8TB Optimus GX Pro 8100 is a double-sided drive. At all other capacities, it is single-sided. If you’re going for the heatsinked version of the drive, this doesn’t matter, though. In rare cases, you might have a system that needs or prefers a single-sided drive, in which case it’s worth being aware of the fact that you will be limited to 4TB.

As to why the drive is double-sided only at 8TB, that has to do with how many NAND flash packages can fit on the PCB. With the controller and DRAM on the top side, there is only room for two flash packages. Each package can usually have a maximum of sixteen dies. Each die is 1Tb, or 128GB. Therefore, each package contains a maximum of 2TB of flash. Since four packages are necessary for 8TB, the 8TB SKU is necessarily double-sided. There will be exceptions to this on drives that can fit four flash packages per side – DRAM-less drives, and especially ones with only four flash channels, as the controllers may be smaller, or drives with denser flash. 2Tb QLC flash is certainly a possibility, although for the time being, such flash would be prioritized for enterprise.

The only other interesting information here is the power rating. 3.3V / 2.7A puts the power ceiling around 9W, which is more than ample for the average power numbers that SanDisk lists on the specifications sheet. We should point out that those numbers are averages, and for reads and writes separately. In fact, the drive via SMART is rated for active power draw of 8.9W – exactly where 3.3V / 2.7A hits – with a potential peak of 9.5W. Active power could include mixed workloads, that is, both reads and writes, and as that’s what we test, we would expect our maximum value to be closer to that active power number.

The drive has an SSD controller, power management circuitry, two DRAM packages, and four NAND flash packages. The controller is branded SanDisk with the “A101” being telltale, but the “2508” in the middle tells us the truth: this is a Silicon Motion SM2508 and not a proprietary solution. This is a high-end PCIe 5.0 controller with eight flash channels and DRAM support. It’s newer than the original PCIe 5.0 controller, the Phison E26, and is made in a smaller process node. As a result, it is significantly more power-efficient, which is a very good thing considering that some E26 drives came with active cooling. WD and SanDisk do tweak the controller firmware and use nCache 4.0 to separate the drive from more generic designs.

The DRAM is labeled D8CKD, and each package is thus 32 GB or 4GB of DDR4 in a 16-bit configuration. This is 8GB total, which maintains the 1GB:1TB DRAM:NAND flash ratio we expect for optimal performance. You could use more efficient DRAM, but the power savings would be relatively small. The flash – labeled in part with 2527 for the 27th week of 2025, exactly matching the controller’s 2527 – is 1Tb BiCS8 TLC. This flash has proven to be power-efficient with exceptionally low random read latency. There’s a reason we find the Black SN8100 hard to beat, and that’s with this combination of characteristics.

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Comparison Products

We’ll be comparing the 8TB Optimus GX Pro 8100 to the 2TB WD Black SN8100 – this is effectively the same drive, but at a lower capacity – as well as the 8TB Samsung 9100 Pro, perhaps the best known high-end PCIe 5.0 SSD available at 8TB. The Kingston Fury Renegade, which also uses the same hardware as the Optimus GX Pro 8100 and Black SN8100, is available at 8TB but reviewed at 2TB. It does perform differently from the other two drives, as WD and SanDisk have custom optimization.

We’ve also thrown in the Crucial T710, with the same controller but Micron’s 276-Layer TLC flash instead of BiCS8, and the Phison E26-based Corsair MP700 Pro SE with Micron’s 232-Layer TLC. This latter flash is used with the Silicon Motion SM2508 controller – the same as the Optimus GX Pro 8100 uses – on the Lexar NM1090 Pro and other “budget” high-end PCIe 5.0 drives. Lower-end PCIe 5.0 drives include the Addlink G55 and Crucial P510, included to illustrate the gap between the mid-range and the high end.

This gives a good set of drives for comparison with two areas lacking: PCIe 4.0 drives, which we really don’t think can compare to a monstrous drive like this, and Phison E28-based drives, since we haven’t really seen those on the market and never at 8TB. We’re comparing drives that exist on the market or have been generally available to account for real-world market conditions.

Trace Testing — 3DMark Storage Benchmark

Built for gamers, 3DMark’s Storage Benchmark focuses on real-world gaming performance. Each round in this benchmark stresses storage based on gaming activities, including loading games, saving progress, installing game files, and recording gameplay video streams. Future gaming benchmarks will be DirectStorage-inclusive, and an evaluation for future-proofing is included where applicable.

We just spoke about the excellent latency we see with the Optimus GX Pro 8100’s BiCS8 flash, and here we can see the flash in action. The drive is just as fast as the Black SN8100 – unsurprising, as it uses the same hardware, which puts it above every other drive we’ve tested. The drive does appear to be a little bit slower at 8TB when factoring in bandwidth, but this is also unsurprising. Drives with an excess of flash will have more overhead and perform more weakly. However, this is still an incredibly fast drive on par with something like the Corsair MP700 Pro XT, a superfast drive we don’t have on this list because frankly, we haven’t seen the drive available and certainly not at 8TB.

The only thing we can add here is some discussion about using a drive like this for gaming. In fact, SanDisk does advertise the Game Mode, and we think that’s worth mentioning. The SanDisk Dashboard lets you enable, disable, or use auto-detection for Game Mode, a feature that basically puts or keeps the drive in a higher power state for superior readiness. We can loosely estimate what this will mean for load-time improvement, as we can see the enter and exit latencies in SMART. For this drive, from idle to load, these are 1,500µs and 8,500µs or 1.5ms and 8.5ms, if you prefer. Very small amounts of time in the grand scheme of things, and you will see real gains about an order of magnitude better…which is still really small.

As it so happens, SanDisk does show the difference in Final Fantasy XIV. For the 8TB drive, the average improvement is 0.05s, which is on the order of ~1%. This is on an Intel system, for those keeping count. AMD and Intel platforms will perform differently. Naturally, this result is not super impressive, but some systems and games will see larger improvements. We think for desktop use, and if this is your primary drive – a drive you use for everything, especially then Game Mode could be a free tweak. Just don’t set your expectations too high.

Trace Testing — PCMark 10 Storage Benchmark

PCMark 10 is an industry standard trace-based benchmark that uses a wide-ranging set of real-world traces from popular applications and everyday tasks to measure the performance of storage devices. The results are particularly useful when analyzing drives for their use as primary/boot storage devices and in work environments.

PCMark 10 performance is phenomenal. There is no performance drop evident from going up to 8TB from 2TB, either. This is a very expensive drive – the 8TB Black SN8100 might be the better bet, but it is still expensive – and it’s worth every penny if you care about having the absolute highest levels of performance combined with capacity. This is a much more expensive proposition these days than it was a year or two ago, and, usually, we would recommend putting that money elsewhere in your build. Unfortunately, other hardware components, such as RAM, have also seen massive price increases. We don’t expect SSD prices to come down soon, either, so prepare yourself for a serious investment if this is the way you want to go.

Console Testing — PlayStation 5 Transfers

The PlayStation 5 is capable of taking one additional PCIe 4.0 or faster SSD for extra game storage. While any 4.0 drive will technically work, Sony recommends drives that can deliver at least 5,500 MB/s of sequential read bandwidth for optimal performance. Based on our extensive testing, PCIe 5.0 SSDs don’t bring much to the table and generally shouldn’t be used in the PS5, especially as they may require additional cooling. Check our Best PS5 SSDs article for more information.

Our testing utilizes the PS5’s internal storage test and manual read/write tests with over 192GB of data, both from and to the internal storage. Throttling is prevented where possible to see how each drive operates under ideal conditions. While game load times should not deviate much from drive to drive, our results can indicate which drives may be more responsive in long-term use.

As expected, the Optimus GX Pro 8100 performs well in the PS5. This drive is overkill for the console in every possible way, but it will deliver a good experience if you decide to buy it for this use case. There is some argument to be made for an 8TB PS5 drive – you can’t add multiple internal drives as you can on a desktop PC, and maybe you want extreme capacity, too. This drive running at PCIe 4.0 speeds will also be pretty efficient, which is a nice bonus. Conceivably, you might use the drive in your PS5 temporarily, future-proofing, or making an investment in the drive. Regardless of your potential reasons, we still recommend reserving this drive for a high-end desktop.

Transfer Rates — DiskBench

We use the DiskBench storage benchmarking tool to test file transfer performance with a custom 50GB dataset. We write 31,227 files of various types, such as pictures, PDFs, and videos to the test drive, then make a copy of that data to a new folder, and follow up with a reading test of a newly-written 6.5GB zip file. This is a real-world type workload that fits into the cache of most drives.

With DiskBench, we’re primarily looking at the copy transfer rate to get a good feel for real-world mixed I/O performance. The Optimus GX Pro 8100 matches the Fury Renegade G5 almost exactly, which, considering they use the same hardware, makes sense. WD and SanDisk get more performance out of this hardware thanks to proprietary optimizations; you can see this with the Black SN8100’s superior result, which again makes for a very fast drive. Drives with Phison’s E28 controller, like the aforementioned Corsair MP700 Pro XT, are faster yet, but are just not readily available at this time. We consider the Black SN8100, and therefore the Optimus GX Pro 8100, as being the fastest drives you can regularly buy right now.

We should emphasize that the latter drive is slower than the former in this specific test because we’re comparing a 2TB to 8TB. An 8TB drive can have more overhead with more flash dies. You can see from the specifications table that the 8TB drive pulls more power, for example, and ultimately, performance takes many factors, including power consumption or heat dissipation, into consideration as the controller is always trying to optimize multiple things simultaneously.

Also, write performance is contingent on pSLC caching, which is not precisely the same at different capacities. The cache will be relatively larger at 8TB than 2TB, but with very large caches, as are used with SanDisk’s nCache 4.0, it is likely that the average write speed at 8TB will be somewhat reduced. The controller has to juggle multiple objectives at once, like incoming writes, already-written writes that have to be moved over from the cache, interruptive reads, wear-leveling, etc., which is a job that becomes more complex with 64 flash dies. As a result, slightly lower performance here and in our write saturation test is expected.

Synthetic Testing — ATTO / CrystalDiskMark

ATTO and CrystalDiskMark (CDM) are free and easy-to-use storage benchmarking tools that SSD vendors commonly use to assign performance specifications to their products. Both of these tools give us insight into how each device handles different file sizes and at different queue depths for both sequential and random workloads.

Let’s start with ATTO and take a look at reads, as writes are pretty stable with this drive. For reads, we see the MP700 Pro SE, the only drive using the Phison E26 controller here, doing the best below 4KiB. We’ve pointed this out before, as many E26 drives, the MP700 Pro SE included, have twice as much volatile memory (DRAM) as normal. That is, this 4TB drive has 8GB of DRAM. We posited that this might be because the E26 had enterprise origins, and the one case you’d need more memory is if you went with a smaller granularity for mapping or had other, heavier metadata requirements.

To cover the technicals quickly, most drives opt to map 4KiB logical pages with 32-bit (4-byte) addressing, which delivers the 1GB:1TB DRAM:NAND flash ratio. This ignores compression and non-mapping metadata, but it is decently representative of the general requirement. If you need to map with smaller granularity, many enterprise workloads demand 2KiB I/O, which is one reason Samsung’s original Z-NAND operates in both 2KiB and 4KiB modes; then you want more memory. This may be one reason the E26 is better here. This is probably only interesting to you if you’re buying a high-end drive and specifically need enhanced performance in this area. Other metadata cases also need memory, but many algorithms, including those for wear-leveling, use block-level granularity, which requires far less memory given large modern block sizes.

The other area of note is 2MiB, where we see many, but not all, of the drives dip. In some cases, this might be because of superpage alignment or nuances of the flash, controller, or flash and controller combination. The NM1090 Pro, for example, doesn’t look too happy there, but the Kingston Fury Renegade G5 has no issue. A look at our logarithmic scale graph shows that the differences between the affected drives are otherwise exaggerated, which matches our real-world findings. Nevertheless, we would recommend a drive with newer flash, like BiCS8, 276-Layer Micron, or Samsung’s 236-Layer, if you want the most consistent performance across larger block sizes. If you’re dealing with media and larger files, that means you.

This translates to CDM, where the QD1 sequential read results for 1MB give some idea of real-world file transfer performance. The Optimus GX Pro 8100 suffers to some extent here, although that might be in part due to its high capacity. Worth noting is that the 8TB 9100 Pro doesn’t suffer in comparison to its 2TB peer, but we’re dealing with a different controller and different flash. Samsung specifically is very good at packaging, which could be one reason. Regardless, the Optimus GX Pro 8100 is able to recover at a higher queue depth, but that only pulls it even with the other top drives. Sequential writes are a different story as the drive handles itself well, and it outperforms the 8TB 9100 Pro at both queue depths. This makes it more interesting for some workloads where you might expect more writes.

Random 4KB latency is also good with random read latency, in particular, being off the chart. Other drives just can’t compare. If you thought the Black SN8100 was a fluke, think again. Drives with the same hardware, like the Fury Renegade G5, also can’t compete with WD’s and SanDisk’s optimization. This level of performance is stellar compared to what we considered the old cut-off for high performance at 45µs. The Optimus GX Pro 8100 is a bit slower than the Black SN8100, but all this really does is underline that these drives are clearly the fastest 8TB drives out there when it comes to what most people care about. For many enthusiasts, this result alone makes the drive the de facto choice.

Sustained Write Performance and Cache Recovery

Official write specifications are only part of the performance picture. Most SSDs implement a write cache, which is a fast area of pseudo-SLC (single-bit) programmed flash that absorbs incoming data. Sustained write speeds can suffer tremendously once the workload spills outside of the cache and into the "native" TLC (three-bit) or QLC (four-bit) flash. Performance can suffer even more if the drive is forced to fold, the process of migrating data out of the cache in order to free up space for further incoming data.

We use Iometer to hammer the SSD with sequential writes for 15 minutes to measure both the size of the write cache and performance after the cache is saturated. We also monitor cache recovery via multiple idle rounds. This process shows the performance of the drive in various states including the steady state write performance.

This is an 8TB drive, and an 8TB drive can have a massive pSLC cache. A 3-bit, TLC drive operating in a single-bit mode can have a cache up to one-third its capacity. For an 8TB drive, this is approximately 2.7TB if you’re going by maximum user space, but it can be larger if you’re going by raw flash. The reason we mention this is that it often appears as if WD’s or SanDisk’s nCache 4.0 is a full-drive, dynamic pSLC scheme, but in reality, there is a static portion, and, further, it seems that some amount of flash is left free to improve write consistency. Static pSLC is always available and operates separately from dynamic pSLC, which also improves write consistency. The sizes of each portion can differ with a hybrid scheme, as is the case with Samsung’s TurboWrite 2.0 on the 9100 Pro and other drives.

With that explanation out of the way, let’s look at the drive’s response. It writes at 13.1 GB/s for over 204 seconds with a 2,673GB cache. This is a little bit slower than the Black SN8100’s 13.2 GB/s. Once the cache is exhausted, the drive can write directly to the TLC flash at around 7.64 GB/s. This precisely matches expectations as it’s less than double the speed of the 2TB Black SN8100’s ~3.92 GB/s in this mode. We would expect up to double the speed with double the flash in parallel — the 2TB drive has 16 dies when you can parallelize up to double that amount with four dies per eight flash channels, reached at 4TB and not improved at 8TB. In fact, going up to 8TB can slightly reduce performance.

Finally, the drive runs out of free cache and is forced to wait for data to be moved over from pSLC to native TLC. This “folding” mode slows the drive down considerably. Our steady state write performance for the drive comes in at over 3.1 GB/s, which is less than one-half the TLC speed and, in fact, lower than what the 2TB Black SN8100 achieves. This is because having a large cache means you are fighting a losing battle with sufficiently long writes. You’re trading capacity for temporary speed, but eventually, that has to be paid back. The 8TB 9100 Pro, which also writes a bit slower than its 2TB version at steady state, is way behind the Optimus GX Pro 8100 at just 1.7 GB/s. This is somewhat misleading as the 9100 Pro has very consistent write performance, but it is undeniably slower. Jumping back and forth with write performance as cache is freed is not ideal on top of the added latency to reads during folding. Writing more slowly can improve endurance in part by deferring writes to avoid unnecessary rewrites, so speed is not everything.

Power Consumption and Temperature

We use the Quarch HD Programmable Power Module to gain a deeper understanding of power characteristics. Idle power consumption is an important aspect to consider, especially if you're looking for a laptop upgrade, as even the best ultrabooks can have mediocre stock storage in terms of capacity and performance. Desktops are often more performance-oriented with less support for power-saving features, so we show the worst-case scenario for idle.

Some SSDs can consume watts of power at idle while better-suited ones sip just milliwatts. Average workload power consumption and max consumption are two other aspects of power consumption, but performance-per-watt, or efficiency, is more important. A drive might consume more power during any given workload, but accomplishing a task faster allows the drive to drop into an idle state more quickly, ultimately saving energy.

For temperature recording, we currently poll the drive’s primary composite sensor during testing with a ~22°C ambient. Our testing is rigorous enough to heat the drive to a realistic ceiling temperature, but real-world temperatures will vary due to the environment and workload factors.

The Black SN8100 is an extremely efficient drive, so we had high hopes for the Optimus GX Pro 8100, too. Luckily, the drive remains very efficient even at 8TB, beating all but the newest, most efficient drives. It also easily clears the 8TH 9100 Pro, its foremost rival. At over 600 MB/s per watt, this drive can even be run without a heatsink.

In our testing, it reached 75°C, which is 15°C below the initial throttling state. We usually recommend at least 10°C of headroom, with 20°C being ideal. In-between means that you may want to put a heatsink on this drive in hotter systems to be on the safe side. However, that aside, being able to hammer an 8TB high-end PCIe 5.0 drive with writes at a reasonable temperature and being able to copy files efficiently is, frankly, astounding at this level of performance.

The Optimus GX Pro 8100 is simply peerless until we see more 8TB options on the market. We freely admit that we think the 8TB Fury Renegade G5 would give it a run for its money, but, on the whole, the Optimus GX Pro 8100 would probably win. There are no 8TB E28-based drives available, so we feel safe in saying that this is what peak performance looks like at this time.

Test Bench and Testing Notes

We use an Alder Lake platform with most background applications, such as indexing, Windows updates, and anti-virus, disabled in the OS to reduce run-to-run variability. Each SSD is prefilled to 50% capacity and tested as a secondary device. Unless noted, we use active cooling for all SSDs.

SanDisk Optimus GX Pro 8100 Bottom Line

The SanDisk Optimus GX Pro 8100 is simply the finest, fastest 8TB SSD on the market. Yes, it’s the same as the WD Black SN8100, but this is the one we have before us. You can’t go wrong with either drive. We think it would beat the 8TB Kingston Fury Renegade, given WD’s and SanDisk’s special sauce, and we feel it defeats the 8TB Samsung 9100 Pro overall. Your other option is the 8TB WD Black SN850X, which is, of course, only PCIe 4.0. Right now, it’s $300 less, or to put it another way, the Black SN8100 is 20% more. Is it worth the jump up? Honestly, yes, if you want maximum performance, but having the option of the Black SN850X is nice for older systems and the PS5. Many laptops can’t take advantage of PCIe 5.0 drives yet, either. On the other hand, if you’re dropping this much money, then maybe you should go all out and just future-proof.

The Optimus GX Pro 8100 shines almost everywhere it matters. It has class-leading random read latency, which, for many users, is the metric to use for real-world feel. It’s lightning fast even without the optional Game Mode enabled, although that makes the drive even more responsive. The drive is very power-efficient, especially compared to earlier PCIe 5.0 solutions. It has plenty of bandwidth, and SanDisk backs it with all the software you need.

The drive is not perfect, but it performs well enough in all of our tests that we would be hard-pressed to put any drive in front of it except maybe something like the Corsair MP700 Pro XT. Which would be fine if such a drive were purchaseable. 8TB drives based on Phison’s E28 controller are coming, but we simply can’t bet on them being available just yet.

If this drive has a downside, it’s the pricing. Right now, the Black SN8100 is the better deal. For that matter, so is the 9100 Pro. However, if we assume the price goes down to where it should be, we can feel it would be the best drive available. We also should point out that the heatsink premium on this drive, right now, is too large to consider, with a custom solution being the way to go. This might also change in the future, and as the heatsink matches the drive with programmable RGB LED, it should be a good option if the premium is cut. We have no other complaints with the drive and could even, in some cases, recommend it for PCIe 4.0 slots, as, frankly, it has the performance to sustain PCIe 4.0 speeds and would be even more power-efficient. It’s just that the experience will cost you, whether you go for this or the Black SN8100.

MORE: Best SSDs

MORE: Best External SSDs

MORE: Best SSD for the Steam Deck

In a world of rapidly developing artificial intelligence, the supply of computer hardware can barely meet demand, and at this point, long-term supply agreements (LTAs) become compulsory. When it comes to storage — both hard disk drives and solid-state drives — LTAs now span from three to five years, depending on the device. While some may argue that now all the supply will get to large customers, such agreements with guaranteed offtake may actually be good for consumers.

Up to five year LTAs

When it comes to SSDs, long-term supply agreements now span five years, according to Sandisk.

"The duration of this agreement varies, with the longest contract extending to five years," said Luis Visoso, chief financial officer of SanDisk, in an earnings call with analysts and investors. "In aggregate, volume commitments increased during the life of the contracts with quarterly commitments and a combination of fixed and variable pricing. […] These agreements are tailored to meet the needs of our customers and, in aggregate, provide us with demand certainty at financials that we expect will be consistent with our fiscal fourth quarter guidance."

Something similar applies to hard drives, though LTA visibility of Seagate and Western Digital is a bit shorter. In the case of Seagate, the company is even talking about bespoke storage systems.

"We have exabyte-scale supply agreements in place with nearly all major cloud and hyperscale customers, with nearline capacity almost fully allocated through calendar 2027," said William Mosley, chief executive of Seagate, in the company's most recent conference call. "At the same time, we are finalizing build-to-order contracts with these customers through the end of fiscal 2027, which defines specific configuration and pricing. Our value-based pricing approach enables customers to plan with confidence while contributing to sustained profit growth for Seagate, and we are actively engaged in strategic planning discussions now reaching into calendar 2028 and beyond."

The same applies to Western Digital. "Our long-term visibility continues to improve, with the duration of our agreements now extending into calendar year 2028 and calendar year 2029," said Irving Tan, chief executive of Western Digital.

Clear visibility

For years, storage has been considered a commodity, so now these long-term supply agreements give storage makers unusually clear visibility into real demand, which enables them to scale production in a far more disciplined way. SanDisk, Seagate, and Western Digital can now align NAND wafer starts, HDDs, HDD media output, and controller supply with multi-year volume commitments instead of reacting to short-term market demand. On the one hand, this reduces the risk of overbuilding capacity; on the other hand, it may ensure a lack of underinvesting ahead of demand increases.

With guaranteed demand secured using multi-year contracts, the aforementioned three companies are also more willing to commit billions of dollars to the expansion of fabs, assembly lines, and next-generation technologies such as higher-layer NAND and heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR). What is even more important, these investments are aimed at confirmed demand rather than speculative forecasts, which in turn enables these companies to look beyond guaranteed demand, which in turn means speculative forecasts on the consumer market. Whether or not they are going to do that remains to be seen.

That being said, expansion remains inherently gradual. New 3D NAND memory capacity —like any semiconductor fab — usually takes years to ramp, and HDD advancements depend on incremental media and read/write head production increases usually at third parties like Hoya, Resonac (former Showa Denko), and TDK, which means supply will tighten before new capacity fully materializes.

To sum up, while a clear visibility of demand gives Sandisk, Seagate, and Western Digital more ability to spend, we have yet to see how everything works out.

Most of the industry is focused on RAM and SSDs when it comes to the chip shortage that exploded in late 2025, but another storage segment is also being greatly affected by the lack of supply. According to a PCWorld investigation, USB drives and memory cards are showing massive price hikes from last year. In fact, we checked out several memory products on Amazon and compared their price histories on CamelCamelCamel and discovered that the median price increase across formats and capacities is a whopping 123%.

While these storage formats are often slower than SSDs, they still use NAND chips from wafers that could be manufactured from the same production lines, with their differences coming from binning and quality tiers. So, it would make sense for memory chip fabs to optimize their production lines for higher-bin NAND chips for SSDs. These drives are often used by AI data center customers who are willing to pay a premium to secure the storage they need. This optimization, in turn, could lead to a smaller supply of low-bin NAND chips for USB flash drive and memory card manufacturing, leading to higher costs for brands like SanDisk and Lexar, among others.

Because of this, manufacturers are increasingly turning towards more premium products to justify their prices. Just last week, SanDisk quietly released a 2TB variant of its top-tier Extreme Pro UHS-II SD card for $2,000, meaning this card would cost photographers, videographers, and other users $0.98 per GB. By comparison, the lower-tier 2TB SanDisk Extreme Pro UHS-I SDXC card only costs $440, or about $0.21 per GB. SanDisk isn’t the only company doing this, as other manufacturers like Lexar and Kingston both have premium memory cards that are in a similar price range.

Memory card manufacturers have no choice but to adapt to the current realities of the market. “Facing the shortage of supply, our strategy is to focus on high-end products instead of expanding our factories or manufacturing,” Lexar Senior Marketing Director Lincoln Lin said during a company-sponsored media trip. He also added, “We think this is what we should do in the current supply shortage situation. Because of the supply limitations, we have to release more high-value products and keep some differentiation for our consumers.”

The market response to increasing prices has also been interesting. Lexar EU General Manager Grace Su pointed out that the company has prepared lower-capacity and lower-performance drives to give buyers options. “This is a curiosity for me as buyers have in their mind, ‘I would like a 1TB [drive]. 1TB is the minimum capacity I want to have. Now that I can only afford 512GB, I can wait,’” Su said. While she said this in reference to consumers purchasing SSDs, it could also apply to those looking for memory cards who need a minimum capacity for their specific use-case.

SanDisk has quietly introduced a 2TB version of its Extreme Pro UHS-II SD card, with the company boasting an up to 310 MB/s sequential read performance and 305 MB/s sequential write performance. This is an expensive memory card, though, with the SD card costing a staggering $1,999.99 on Amazon, a more than four-fold increase versus the lower-tier 2TB Extreme Pro UHS-I SD Card and a sign of the challenging times facing the storage industry. However, it does offer higher sequential read performance and more than double the sequential write performance of the more affordable 2TB memory card, which you can pick up for less than $500.

• Get the SanDisk 2TB Extreme Pro SDXC UHS-II V90 on Amazon.

This memory card is specifically designed for professional videographers and photographers, especially those who shoot 8K footage or require high-resolution burst photography. While microSD Express Cards deliver better performance because of their use of modern PCIe and NVMe technology, most digital cameras still use the older SD standard, meaning users won’t be able to enjoy the higher speeds that the newer standard affords. Despite having inferior performance, the 2TB SanDisk Extreme Pro UHS-II is still more expensive than the SanDisk microSD Express card on a per GB basis. The 512GB SanDisk microSD Express only costs $119.99, meaning you’re paying $0.23 per GB.

By comparison, the 2TB SanDisk Extreme Pro UHS-II SD card costs approximately $1.00 per GB. Unfortunately, this rings true for the entire lineup:

The SanDisk Extreme Pro UHS-II SD card comes with a few extra features that you won’t find on lower-tier cards, like an IP68 environmental protection rating, as well as having been proven to withstand drops of up to 6 meters or nearly 20 feet. So, if you frequently shoot at high resolutions, the speed bump that this $2,000 SD card might be well worth the investment — but for every other user, this is likely too much, and you’re better off getting a more affordable but slightly slower alternative.

Although the speed and capacity of the memory card are pushing up the price, the current memory and storage chip shortage is also likely making it more expensive to manufacture SD cards. Because of this, some companies focus on premium products that have a higher retail price, allowing them to offset their increased costs. We can also see this with SD cards from competing manufacturers like Lexar and Kingston that have similar specifications coming in at comparable prices.

Typical NAND chips present in SSDs have steadily evolved in speed and capacity over time, with contemporary server-grade units capable of reaching 28 GB/s per unit. Somehow, that's still not enough for the AI world. In turn, SK Hynix and SanDisk have jointly announced HBF, or High Bandwidth Flash, for the inference servers of tomorrow.

The official press release is exceedingly light on details, but it mentions that HBF is specifically poised to act as a layer between HBM DRAM and flash SSDs. Given that a stack of current-gen HBM3E is good for around 1.2 TB/s, we can hypothesize that HCF chips could be gunning for speeds of at least 10 GB/s each, if not more, for combined speeds in the hundreds of GB/s. After all, going to the trouble of creating an entirely new standard wouldn't make much sense otherwise.

Power efficiency is apparently a concern for the standard-bearers, a pretty understandable notion in this day and age, where datacenters have massive wattage needs. A high-end Micron 9650 SSD pulls 25 W at full tilt, a figure that gets really ugly really fast when you think in exabyte-scale deployments with tens of thousands of drives.

There are no specifics on how this new HBF is meant to interact with systems, but the vague wording of "supporting layer" could mean it would be analogous to an on-SSD cache, but much bigger. It could also be a really fast block storage device a la Optane that applications and/or operating systems would have to be tweaked to use efficiently.

The announcement offers no target date, but it mentions that "demand of complex memory solutions, including HBF, will pick up around 2030", so that's as a good estimate as any for a production release date. The standard will be under the purview of the Open Compute Project. The companies are targeting HBF at inference servers, given that the outputs that bots users produce needs to be stored somewhere, and that storage need is projected to grow exponentially.

SanDisk’s stock price hit an all-time high of $650 per share at market open today, but has since dropped to $587.96. Despite that, it’s still an increase of over 1,500% from last year, when its stock was priced at $36 per share. This massive surge is driven by record-breaking profits for the company, which rose 7.7x year over year to $803 million, as reported by Digitimes. The company also noted in its January 29 earnings release that it will extend its joint venture with Japanese flash memory and SSD manufacturer Kioxia, as the two companies prepare to launch their next-generation 3D NAND in 2026.

This growth is primarily driven by the ongoing AI buildout, with revenue from AI data centers, hyperscalers, and semi-custom customers growing by 76%. Aside from that, revenue from industrial and automotive customers increased by 63%, while revenue from the consumer market grew by 52%. “This quarter’s performance underscores our agility in capitalizing on better product mix,” SanDisk CEO David Goeckeler said. “All at a time when the critical role that our products play in powering AI and the world’s technology is being recognized.”

Memory chips have made headlines as their prices have skyrocketed globally, but NAND is expected to follow close behind as AI tech companies pour money into infrastructure and siphon the world’s supply of memory and storage. In fact, a Kingston rep warned late last year that you shouldn’t wait if you need to upgrade your RAM or SSD, as “prices will continue to go up.”

SanDisk is one good example of this, as the company is set to double the price of its 3D NAND enterprise SSDs in the first quarter of this year. It’s unclear whether this move will also affect the 3D NAND used in consumer products, but they’re typically manufactured in the same fabs that produce these enterprise-grade chips. But as AI companies continue to build more advanced models, the ever-increasing training and inference workload will only increase demand for NAND chips, helping SanDisk increase its revenue even further.

Sandisk is on track to double the price of its high-capacity 3D NAND memory devices for enterprise-grade solid-state drives this quarter in anticipation of strong demand for server-class storage in the coming quarters, reports Nomura Securities (via @jukan05). It is unclear to what degree the price increase of high-capacity 3D NAND will affect quotes on mainstream flash memory used in client devices, but normally, 3D NAND for smartphones and PCs follows enterprise-grade chips as they are made at the same fabs.

"Channel checks indicate that several memory suppliers continued to push prices higher, with enterprise-grade NAND facing especially aggressive increases," a note to clients by Nomura Securities reads. "SanDisk’s NAND used in enterprise SSDs is cited as potentially rising by more than 100% quarter over quarter in the March period."

Nomura Securities, which is among the prominent financial analyst firms with good contacts in the high-tech industry, attributes plans of memory suppliers to increase prices of enterprise-grade 3D NAND both to short-term shortages and to mid-term growth of demand driven by AI in general and changes to AI storage in particular.

Nomura names Nvidia's Inference Context Memory Storage Platform (ICMSP) — which is based on the BlueField-4 DPU equipped with a 512 GB SSD that carries KV cache — among the demand drivers for enterprise storage this year. Every compute tray in the VR NVL144 rack is equipped with a BlueField-4 data processing unit with a 512 GB drive, making it 18 DPUs with 9.216 TB of 3D NAND per rack. Assuming that Nvidia ships 50,000 VR NVL144 racks per annum, the company will have to get roughly 0.439 EB of 3D NAND somewhere. Its partners supplying their versions of VR NVL144 racks with BlueField-4 DPUs will also increase their consumption of 3D NAND memory this year with the Vera Rubin platform.

While Nvidia's ICMSP can consume around an exabyte of 3D NAND per annum in 2026 ~ 2027 in the best case scenario, it cannot really be a reason for 3D NAND price doubling overnight, as the industry produces over 800 EB of NAND every year. Meanwhile, we still do not know how much 3D NAND a typical VR NVL144 machine carries, so we cannot estimate storage demands for Rubin-based platforms in general.

Nonetheless, as demand for AI systems for storage is skyrocketing in general, they will inevitably drive up demand, and once it outpaces supply, prices will get higher, which is exactly what we are seeing today.

Kioxia will produce its next-generation BICS9 and BICS10 3D NAND memory next year, but will use different fab sites for different types of flash, according to Nikkei. BiCS10 transitions to an all-new 332-layer 3D NAND array to address high-capacity solutions for AI and hyperscalers.

Perhaps the biggest surprise about 332-layer BiCS10 is that Kioxia (and Sandisk) is pulling in production of this type of memory to 2026, if the Nikkei report is correct. The publication states that both companies initially planned to produce BiCS10 memory in the second half of 2027. However, demand from the AI, cloud, and enterprise sectors likely prompted Kioxia to begin production ahead of schedule for its most advanced memory announced to date.

While both BICS9 and BICS10 use the CBA (CMOS directly Bonded to Array) architecture and boast a 4.8 GT/s Toggle DDR 6.0 interface, BICS9 uses a smaller 218-layer 3D NAND array to target performance-hungry low-power applications.

Different fabs for different memory

As noted above, Kioxia (and therefore Sandisk) will use different fab sites to make BiCS9 and BiCS10 3D NAND. Specifically, the newest Fab 2 near Kitakami, Iwate prefecture, will become the base for making high-capacity 332-layer BiCS10 NAND, whereas the established complex near Yokkaichi in Japan's Mie prefecture will remain the center for 218-layer BiCS9 3D NAND.

The decision to produce flagship BiCS10 devices at Fab 2 in Iwate Prefecture makes a lot of sense, as the site has the latest equipment, even though Kioxia's R&D center is in Yokkaichi. However, the fabs in Yokkaichi are still good enough (and largely depreciated) for BiCS9, will address mainstream devices, and must be cost-effective to manufacture.

Keep in mind that the information is largely unofficial and unconfirmed by Kioxia and Sandisk; many details are subject to change ahead of an official announcement.

CBA: The key to next-generation 3D NAND

Developing high-speed memory interfaces for 3D NAND is challenging, so leading flash memory suppliers have taken a page from Yangtze Memory's playbook. Companies have begun producing memory arrays and peripheral CMOS logic responsible for memory operations on separate layers. These are then attached together using hybrid-bonding techniques. Kioxia and Samsung call their architecture CMOS Directly Bonded to Array (CBA) and have been deploying the technique since BiCS8 3D NAND, which started production in the second half of 2024.

The companies plan to continue using CBA with BiCS9 and BiCS10, but this time around, adopting an 8-bit Toggle DDR 6.0 interface with a 4.8 GT/s data transfer rate (600 MB/s). This is done to increase performance to unprecedented levels for both generations of 3D NAND, which are set to coexist in the market, targeting different applications.

Kioxia’s Toggle DDR 6.0 interface combines three elements: an unmatched DQS timing scheme, per-pin VREF training (PPVT), and a compact 2-way decision-feedback equalizer (2TI-DFE). Each data pin (DQ [7:0]) has its own calibrated reference voltage, enabling the receiver to detect bits at 4.8 Gbps correctly.

Instead of using the heavier 4-way interleaved DFE used in DRAM interfaces, Kioxia implemented a 2-way version with a Data-Driven Self-Reset (DDSR) circuit. This holds the previous decision values (OP and OM) until it detects a polarity change via a small 3-input NAND gate, preventing incorrect feedback and reducing both area and power.

On the timing side, the Toggle DDR 6.0 interface uses an unmatched DQS structure with PPVT and a simplified 2TI-DFE to simplify timing alignment while still enabling deterministic data read windowing. This cooperation extends the safe sampling window for incoming data without requiring additional analog hardware, which is costly in terms of power and transistor budget. Shmoo plots for all eight data lines confirm that the interface should stay reliable at 4.8 GT/s with this design.

BiCS9: 218L 3D NAND meets Toggle DDR 6.0 at 4.8 GT/s

Implementing both a very high-speed interface and an all-new 3D NAND array with 332 active layers is a costly project that yields high-performance, high-capacity 3D NAND that not all applications actually require. To that end, BiCS9 combines the proven 218-layer 3D NAND array with the NAND interface at 4.8 GT/s.

As Sandisk calls it, BiCS9 will power 'capital-efficient, high-performance, low-power products,' which primarily includes cost-sensitive client storage solutions such as those used in PCs and smartphones, as well as products that require pure performance, and do not need the highest capacity or storage density available.

Perhaps, once yields of 332-layer 3D NAND match those of 218-layer 3D NAND, Kioxia and Sandisk will transition to the new process technology and lower their costs. For now, it makes more sense for both companies to reserve the 332-layer 3D NAND array for applications requiring maximum storage density and capacity.

BiCS10: 332L 3D NAND with lower latency and lower power meets Toggle DDR 6.0 at 4.8 GT/s

While 332-layer BiCS10 3D NAND increases bit density by a whopping 59% to 29 Gb/mm^2, this isn't the only improvement the new type of memory offers, as it also shrinks read latency by around 4 microseconds, and reduces read power consumption by 29%, from around 100 mj per GB to near 75 mj per GB.

Based on Kioxia's description, the company has boosted read performance in BiCS10 3D NAND by changing how the unselected word lines (WLs) behave during continuous reads. In a very tall 332-layer stack, most of the delay and energy cost comes from repeatedly charging long WL strings from VSS up to VREAD.

Normally, after each read, the internal read voltage fully drops to ground and then climbs back to VREAD for the next cycle, which takes time and draws significant current. Kioxia's new method avoids that full swing: after the first read, the circuit lowers VREAD only to an intermediate level (still above VSS), and then, before the next read, raises it back to the full read voltage. Because the WLs move over a smaller voltage range, the array charges faster and consumes less current. Such an architecture makes the read path more efficient and better suited for continuous-access workloads, which is crucial for high-layer NAND dies.

Finding methods to increase storage capacity, without going to the cloud, is becoming increasingly difficult as device manufacturers remove SD card readers from their devices and replace M.2 or SATA storage with embedded solutions that can't be upgraded. SanDisk has developed a new USB flash drive that is designed to permanently stay in your device. The new drive is available in 128GB, 256GB, 512GB, and 1TB options starting at $26, with the 1TB flagship model going for $120 (though at the time of writing, the 512GB and 1TB variants are "temporarily" out of stock).

• Check out SanDisk's new thumb drive here

The new drive is part of a handful of "Plug and Stay" thumb drives Sandisk has created. This latest iteration features an L-shaped form factor that keeps the drive as thin as possible when connected to a laptop, tablet, or other USB-compatible device. When connected, the drive almost looks like a mini-display installed on the side of whatever device it's hooked up to. It isn't thin enough to completely blend into, say, a laptop, but it is small enough to completely forget about while you are using your device, which is the whole point.

The drive takes advantage of a USB 3.2 Gen 1 interface, boasting transfer speeds of up to 400MB/s. That might not sound fast in our age of PCIe 5.0 NVMe SSDs capable of speeds well over 10GB/s. But 400MB/s is more than acceptable performance from a thumb drive, approaching SATA 3 speeds. In fact, with 400MB/s, you could game on SanDisk's thumb drive without a problem (for games that don't require speedy PCIe NVMe SSDs).

SanDisk's offering is a great solution if you need an extra 128GB to 1TB of storage in a pinch. It is becoming increasingly difficult to expand storage capacity on laptops, tablets, smartphones, and other devices as manufacturers continue to prioritize embedded solutions and the removal of SD and Micro SD card readers. SanDisk mostly fixes this problem with its thumb drive, and the best part is that it is still a thumb drive at the end of the day, so you can use it as any other thumb drive or just leave it in your device forever as a secondary SSD.

SanDisk has been around since the very beginnings of flash memory, and the company has been pushing out external SSDs for over a decade, with at least one big bump along the way. But after recently splitting from WD, the company is still pushing out impressive drives, with the internal M.2-based SN8100 landing as our top PCIe 5.0 pick on our list of the best SSDs.

Does SanDisk have another hit on its hands with its latest external drive, the somewhat awkwardly named "Extreme Pro with USB4"? It’s certainly a nice-looking drive that feels premium (though it is kinda large). And the promised speeds of up to 3,800 MB/s reads and 3,700 MB/s writes look good on paper, as does the 5-year warranty (which may assuage some lingering fears about the company’s drive reliability issues).

We’ll have to put the drive through our usual slate of benchmark testing to see if it earns its fairly high asking price. The 2 TB model we tested currently sells for $279, which is about $70 more than our current favorite USB4 SSD, Corsair’s EX400U. Before we get to testing, here are the specs for the drive, direct from SanDisk:

SanDisk Extreme Pro USB4 Specifications

SanDisk Extreme Pro USB4 design

SanDisk doesn’t try to lure you in with Adobe trials like LaCie, or include extra cables or accessories that you’ll probably lose before you find a use for them. And honestly, that’s fine. Inside the box, you’ll find the drive, a roughly 11-inch USB-C-to-USB-C cable, and the usual paperwork – that’s it.

The drive itself is coated in a soft-touch rubber on the sides and bottom, with diagonal ridges along the front, orange accents along the edges, and a hole in one corner so you can clip it to a bag or something else with a carabiner. The USB Type-C port resides on the bottom edge, also circled in orange.

Overall, the drive looks and feels premium, arguably more so than any drive I’ve tested in years. SanDisk says it has an IP65 rating for water resistance and that it should survive drops up to two meters. That said, while it’s thin at under 12 mm, it’s substantially bigger and heavier (172.37 grams) than most other modern drives.

Comparison drives

Corsair’s competing EX4000U USB4 drive weighs about half as much (92 grams) and is also about half the size, though it is a little thicker and certainly doesn’t feel as nice as the SanDisk drive. LaCie’s Rugged SSD4 (also a USB4 drive) is bulkier, thanks to its orange rubber life jacket, but still shorter than the SanDisk drive and also lighter, at 109 grams.

It’s not like the SanDisk drive is going to weigh your bag down or won’t fit in most pockets. But it is the largest external single-drive SSD I’ve reviewed or used in years.

Storage testbed

In early 2025, we updated our external storage testbed to an AMD Ryzen 7600X-based PC with an Asus ROG Crosshair X870E Hero motherboard, installed in Lian Li’s Lancool 217 case. This was done in part because we needed a system with native USB4 support for upcoming drives (like this one).

All the drives in the charts below have been re-tested on the new X870E system, with the exception of the final Iometer sustained sequential test. That benchmark is less about top speed and more about how long a drive can write before depleting any fast cache onboard. We also updated to CrystalDiskMark 8, rather than the older (and non-comparable) version 7 we used on the previous testbed.

Trace Testing - PCMark 10 Storage Benchmark

PCMark 10 is a trace-based benchmark that uses a wide-ranging set of real-world traces from popular applications and everyday tasks to measure the performance of storage devices.

In this first test, the LaCie SSD4 landed first, but SanDisk’s Extreme Pro USB4 wasn’t far behind, while Corsair’s USB4 drive was a distant third. But that’s not a dynamic that will hold for most of our tests, especially when it comes to write speed.

Transfer Rates – DiskBench

In this real-world file transfer test, SanDisk’s drive comes in first on reads, followed by LaCie’s USB4 drive, and then Corsair drive. But note that the Corsair EX400U nearly doubles the other two drives when it comes to writing files. This disparity was big enough that I ran the test on the SanDisk drive several times and, after achieving similar results, pulled out the Corsair and re-ran it on this test. Again, the results were effectively the same. At least in this real-world 50GB write test, the Corsair drive is significantly speedier.

Synthetic Testing CrystalDiskMark

CrystalDiskMark (CDM) is a free and easy-to-run storage benchmarking tool that SSD companies commonly use to assign product performance specifications. It gives us insight into how each device handles different file sizes. We run this test at its default settings.

Switching back to synthetic tests, the SanDisk drive drops to third when it comes to sequential reads, behind the Corsair and the LaCie. But the SanDisk drive nearly matched its first-place competitor on sequential writes.

Small file read performance sees SanDisk’s Extreme Pro USB4 on top in reads, with the LaCie Rugged SSD Pro4 slipping to fourth place. But again, the Corsair drive stands out in write performance here, with the SanDisk drive surprisingly in second-to-last place.

Sustained Write Performance

A drive's rated write specifications are only a piece of the performance picture. Most external SSDs (just like their internal counterparts) implement a write cache, or a fast area of flash, programmed to perform like faster SLC, that absorbs incoming data.

Sustained write speeds often suffer tremendously when the workload saturates the cache and slips into the "native" TLC or QLC flash. We use Iometer to hammer the SSD with sequential writes for 15 minutes to measure the size of the write cache and performance after the cache is saturated.

Immediately out of the gate, the SanDisk drive looks stunning, writing just below 3,500 MB/s, with only the LaCie Rugged SSD Pro4 getting close, starting just below 3,300 MB/s. But both drives’ performance falls off pretty quickly, with the LaCie dropping to the 1,600 MB/s range after less than 20 seconds. The SanDisk drive hung on at top speed for almost three minutes before dropping to a slower speed of around 1,100 MB/s for about five more minutes, then dropping again, to around 800 MB/s for the rest of our test.

The Corsair EX4000U, meanwhile, never managed to write above just 1,800 MB/s, and dropped to the 1,550-1,650 range after about 20 seconds – but it maintained that speed through the duration of our test (and even longer for a full 30 minutes), while the SanDisk drive was slower than the Corsair after just a few minutes of sustained writes.

In short, while the SanDisk drive is much faster at bursty and mainstream workloads, the Corsair drive is technically faster for big, drive-filling tasks that tend to fall into the “pro” category. That’s a shame from a marketing perspective, given that SanDisk has put Pro in its USB4 drive’s name, while Corsair has not.

Bottom line

SanDisk’s Extreme Pro USB4 drive is fast for mainstream tasks, and I’d argue it’s one of the nicest-looking (and feeling) drives I’ve tested in years. But it costs substantially more than both the Corsair and LaCie USB4 drives we’ve tested recently, while often falling behind them in real-world writes. That makes SanDisk’s USB4 drive hard to recommend, especially to the kind of “pro” users that SanDisk’s marketing is attempting to appeal to.

The Extreme Pro With USB4 is fine for carrying around and backing up files. But if you are often filling up your drive with high-resolution video or images and dumping them to local storage via USB4 or Thunderbolt, you’re better off looking elsewhere. Corsair’s competing EX400U remains our favorite USB4 SSD for most people – helped by the fact that it costs about $70 less at the same 2TB capacity.

If you're looking for the Best SSD for the ROG Xbox Ally and Ally X, then you might want to consider the officially licensed storage for said devices. Announced at Tokyo Game Show, Sandisk is launching both MicroSD cards as well as internal NVMe SSDs as specific brand tie-ins for the new machines. The Sandisk MicroSD Card For ROG Xbox Ally (X) comes in capacities of 512GB, 1TB, and 2TB, while the WD_BLACK SN7100X is available in 2TB and 4TB sizes.

We'll start with the SSD, even though it's not available yet. From all apparent indications, the WD_BLACK SN7100X NVMe SSD appears to be an Xbox-branded version of the SN7100 SSD that we reviewed back in March. That's right: you don't need a tiny M.2-2230 or M.2-2242 SSD like you do for the Steam Deck; just like the original ROG Ally X, the new models support an 80mm drive.

The SN7100(X) should make a great choice for a game storage drive. It's plenty fast, with particularly good random read performance despite being a DRAM-less SSD. It uses TLC flash and Host Memory Buffer to make up for the lack of a dedicated DRAM cache, and the lack of said DRAM helps it to be one of the most power-efficient PCIe 4.0 SSDs we've ever tested. That's great news for battery life, which will be a challenge on the Ally X in particular.

Where the SN7100 comes in capacities ranging from 512GB to 4TB, the SN7100X starts at 2TB—probably because the ROG Xbox Ally X comes with 1TB of PCIe 4.0 x4 storage to begin with. So saying, this upgrade wouldn't be for speed, but for extra capacity.

If you want extra capacity and don't feel like opening your new game system, your other option is a MicroSD card. Despite launching months after the Nintendo Switch 2, the new ROG Xbox Ally devices do not support MicroSD Express. Instead, your best options for expansion are to either spend more for a rare and likely expensive UHS-II card that could reach a potential 312 MB/second, or to buy one of the ubiquitous UHS-I cards that top out at 104MB/second. However, if you buy a Sandisk card with the company's proprietary QuickFlow technology, you can reach speeds of up to 200 MB/second.

Naturally, that's exactly what the Sandisk MicroSD Card For ROG Xbox Ally (X) is. Sandisk is offering the new card in capacities of 512GB, 1TB, and a massive 2TB, and says that it guarantees sequential read speeds of 200 MB/second and sequential writes of 150 MB/second. The company also promises that the cards are drop-, shock-, and X-ray-proof, while offering a limited lifetime warranty for normal usage. Not too bad, but do be aware that the promised speeds are only available in devices that support Sandisk QuickFlow—like the ROG Xbox Ally machines. Just be aware that, like every other UHS-I card, these will be limited to 104 MB/second in standard readers.

It's a bit curious that Sandisk doesn't apply an Application Performance Class to the new cards. The Application Performance Class is that little "A1" or "A2" rating you may have seen on some cards, and it's a standardized speed class that tells you the card in question can handle at least 2,000 (A1) or 4,000 (A2) IOPS. Application launching and game loading are much more sensitive to random performance than sequential numbers, and we'd expect Sandisk's new cards to be capable of the requirements for at least A1, but if so, the vendor doesn't mention it.

If you're keen to pick up one of the officially-branded memory cards, they're available for pre-order on Sandisk's web shop; they'll actually start shipping day and date with the new Xbox handhelds. Meanwhile, the WD_BLACK SN7100X NVMe SSD for ROG Ally (X) and PC "will be available for purchase in the coming months," but you could probably just achieve the exact same thing by buying a regular SN7100.

Thanks to the performance we see with the Sandisk WD Blue SN5100, the market now has not just one great QLC SSD, but two great QLC SSDs. This turn of events was unfathomable a generation of drives ago, but the components are now mature enough to offer great value for everyday users and storage enthusiasts alike. We were first impressed by Crucial's P310, but the Blue SN5100 has quietly come along to redefine what a QLC drive can do.

Sandisk has followed up on the excellent Black SN7100 and SN8100 with another compelling mid-range Blue drive, bumping performance up from the SN5000. The Blue drives have always been a popular and inexpensive option, but in some cases, the different models felt overlapping, even with some of the lower-end Black drives, such as the SN770. It’s almost too much of a good thing. Now, with the SN5100 coming in hot with QLC flash, which the previous SN5000 only used at 4TB, we have a drive designed for everyone.

All of WD’s and Sandisk’s many Blue NVMe SSDs have been good budget performers to the point that it sometimes gets confusing to discern one from another; the controllers and flash used are scalable in that way. The Blue SN5100 carries on with this tradition, but it’s also marking the full transition from TLC to QLC flash. This might horrify some people, but the fact is, this drive performs well for 99% of typical users. You’d have difficulty in a blind taste test between this and the TLC-equipped Black SN7100, and if Sandisk can get the price down to an appropriate level, that’s a very attractive reality.

We still prefer the Blue SN5100 as a secondary or game-focused drive, or perhaps as a budget laptop upgrade drive, but we think it’s to the point that this drive could work anywhere. It feels like it could replace low-end TLC options without issue. There’s something about this drive that puts it ahead of the pack in comparison to some of the older QLC drives, mostly due to the flash. It’s power-efficient and has excellent latency, which makes it feel like a high-end drive a lot of the time. It’s a shame that QLC flash isn’t holding its discount due to enterprise demand because this drive at an optimal price level would be nearly unbeatable. It’s still a drive worth keeping an eye on.

Sandisk WD Blue SN5100 Specifications

The Sandisk WD Blue SN5100 is available in 500GB, 1TB, 2TB, and 4TB capacities. QLC flash can be tricky at lower capacities like 500GB, as there are fewer dies with which to interleave. Performance on this drive is best at 1TB and 2TB, but there will be much interest in the 4TB. The drive can hit up to 7,100 / 6,700 MB/s for sequential reads and writes and up to 1,000K / 1,300K random read and write IOPS.

Pricing at the time of the review was a problem, though, at $54.99, $79.98, and $142.99 for the smaller SKUs. The Sandisk WD Black SN7100 is, in fact, less expensive and, with TLC flash, is the better drive. In fact, that model is an excellent value all around. We suspect the Blue SN5100 will be adjusted below that pricing – that’s the only way the Blue and Black monikers make sense relative to one another — which would make it potentially a fantastic budget SSD.

Sandisk backs the drive with a standard five-year warranty and up to 600TB of writes per TB capacity. QLC flash tends to be rated for only about half the program/erase cycles as comparable TLC, but even then the endurance is sufficient for this many writes. Usually but not always QLC drives will have lower TBW but Sandisk didn't hold back here. This does not reflect actual NAND flash endurance, but rather the TBW is chosen for warranty purposes. This drive isn’t supposed to be beaten up with tons of writes, and enterprise-like workloads can and will wear the flash worse than normal consumer usage. We don’t think this write limit holds back the drive for its intended purpose in any way.

Sandisk WD Blue SN5100 Software and Accessories

Sandisk has two downloads for its SSDs: the SanDisk Dashboard and Acronis True Image. The former is an SSD Toolbox application previously known as the WD Dashboard – if you see that in our past reviews, know that the new dashboard covers both WD and Sandisk SSDs. This dashboard is roughly on par with Samsung’s Magician and is useful for a range of things. Aside from letting you update the drive’s firmware, it also allows you to check and monitor drive health and engage features such as TRIM and secure erase. This application is only for Windows, but True Image also works on macOS. True Image is designed for backups and imaging to protect your data when switching drives, which is always a useful feature.

Sandisk WD Blue SN5100: A Closer Look

The Blue SN5100 is single-sided with a single NAND flash chip, power management circuitry, and a DRAM-less controller. This drive would work in a shorter form factor. The drive does have a QR code PSID, but it is otherwise uninteresting.

A 4TB SKU is on the way and is also single-sided. With current technology, such a drive would have two NAND flash packages with the standard 1Tb dies, but could theoretically get away with just one with 2Tb dies. There is a performance dip for the 4TB models, according to the datasheet, which would be either from extra memory addressing overhead with the latter solution or an abundance of dies in the former. WD could also choose to use 2Tb dies with two NAND flash packages to take advantage of better yields. One reason to stick with a single package is if there is intent for shorter form factors in an OEM counterpart, particularly as such drives tend to be single-sided.

The Sandisk WD Black SN7100 and Sandisk WD Black SN8100 use the TLC version of this flash and show no performance loss at their maximum capacities at the time of our reviews, but we know the controllers are able to handle that many 1Tb dies without an issue. The Black SN7100 has been updated with a 4TB SKU post-review, which does exhibit a similar performance drop as the SN5100, and in that case, it’s due to the use of so many 1Tb dies. To condense this into something understandable: you are going to see some level of performance loss at the highest capacity of these drives. That may impact the upcoming 8TB Black SN8100 as well, unless Sandisk has a trick up its sleeve. This was avoided with the 8TB WD Black SN850X, which utilized newer, denser flash, a strategy later adopted by Samsung with the 4TB 990 Pro.

The A101-000103-A1 is a proprietary controller from Sandisk that is also used on the WD Blue SN5000. This is a simple four-channel DRAM-less controller made to optimally run with 16 dies at 2400 MT/s, which translates to 2TB at 7+ GB/s. BiCS8 is rated for up to 3,600 MT/s, but this is not needed for PCIe 4.0. For PCIe 5.0, this flash with a similar controller, like the Phison E31T, can hit up to at least 10 GB/s. There are advantages other than bandwidth for running at a higher I/O speed, such as slightly better latency. However, running at a lower clock is more power-efficient. The Black SN7100 demonstrates this well by having the best power efficiency we’ve seen to date.

The Blue SN5100 differs from the Black SN7100 by its use of QLC rather than TLC flash. In practice, this isn’t as big a deal as it sounds. In pSLC mode, the flash will perform similarly, and QLC often has optimizations for reads, which might come from native flash. You might never notice a difference between the two. QLC flash does have lower endurance with approximately half the rated amount, depending on the flash and quality, but this is still an immense amount of writes that 99% of users won’t ever hit. Nevertheless, performance concerns do remain for the worst-case, which cannot be denied. We cover this in our write saturation test.

QLC flash should be more affordable as a trade-off, but this often has not been the case. One reason is that enterprise demand for QLC flash is higher than ever to handle large data with far better response times than a mechanical HDD provides. This has gotten worse with the AI and LLM booms, especially considering that the YMTC flash, which could alleviate this shortfall to some degree, has been politically problematic for the U.S.

Most inexpensive 4TB drives with QLC use YMTC flash, in fact, while Micron is holding back its QLC for enterprise and its own drives. That would include the Crucial P310 and the OEM Micron 2600. Historically, BiCS has not made a big splash with QLC flash and has been mostly only available in TLC. This completely changes with the Blue SN5100 as a follow-up to the Blue SN5000.

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Comparison Products

The Blue SN51000 must be understood within the context of Sandisk’s own SSD product stack. We’ve reviewed the Blue SN5000 – which uses QLC flash at 4TB – and the Black SN7100 within the last year or so. The SN5100 should perform better than the first, given by the model version, and below the second, given by the color branding. The Black SN7100 is a direct competitor of Samsung’s 990 EVO Plus, while the Blue SN5100 comes into a market that has quickly been dominated by the QLC-based Crucial P310. These are all good drives vying for roughly the same market, particularly for use in laptops.

The top DRAM-less controller in this segment is the Phison E27T, used by the P310 but also the TLC-based Sabrent Rocket 4. For higher capacities, the Maxio MAP1602 has also done quite well, and we are comparing the QLC-equipped TeamGroup MP44Q for that. SMI’s hardware has been far less common, but we have reviewed the Kingston NV3 – a drive that has various hardware configurations – with the SM2268XT2. Lastly, there is only one four-channel drive with DRAM: the popular Crucial T500.

Trace Testing — 3DMark Storage Benchmark

Built for gamers, 3DMark’s Storage Benchmark focuses on real-world gaming performance. Each round in this benchmark stresses storage based on gaming activities including loading games, saving progress, installing game files, and recording gameplay video streams. Future gaming benchmarks will be DirectStorage-inclusive and we also include notes about which drives may be future-proofed.

The Blue SN5100 finishes first in our 3DMark testing. This means it beats even the DRAM-equipped T500. This makes it a great choice for a secondary gaming drive, even over drives, like the 990 EVO Plus, that are often more expensive.

Trace Testing — PCMark 10 Storage Benchmark

PCMark 10 is a trace-based benchmark that uses a wide-ranging set of real-world traces from popular applications and everyday tasks to measure the performance of storage devices. The results are particularly useful when analyzing drives for their use as primary/boot storage devices and in work environments.

The Blue SN5100's PCMark performance is also excellent. It’s right up there with the T500 and P310. It should perform close to the Black SN7100, and it does, because both drives are using very similar hardware. In any pSLC mode – and most benchmarks fall into this category, as does the vast majority of real-world drive use – the drives should perform identically. If you’re using a drive as your primary boot device and tend to have that main drive very full, the results will likely differ from this. In that case, the SN7100, with TLC flash, would be the better choice, and that goes for the T500 with DRAM as well. The 990 EVO Plus is also a good choice for that over the QLC-based options. All three drives now come with a 4TB option, which reduces the QLC advantage.

It’s important to recognize that even though our results aren’t falsely optimistic, we do prepare the drives to get more realistic data before testing. There are many scenarios and edge cases where performance differences between drives will be different and more exaggerated. To condense that down, know your workloads and usage patterns, and apply that to our data. If your drive isn’t heavily used and is well-maintained, then the SN5100 will perform in the best of its class. If not, it may be lower on this list. That consideration must play into your purchase decision, as you can save a significant amount of money over the T500 for an effectively identical experience most of the time.

Console Testing — PlayStation 5 Transfers

The PlayStation 5 is capable of taking one additional PCIe 4.0 or faster SSD for extra game storage. While any PCIe 4.0 drive will technically work, Sony recommends drives that can deliver at least 5,500 MB/s of sequential read bandwidth for optimal performance. In our testing, PCIe 5.0 SSDs don’t bring much to the table and generally shouldn’t be used in the PS5, especially as they may require additional cooling. Check our Best PS5 SSDs article for more information.

Our testing utilizes the PS5’s internal storage test and manual read/write tests with over 192GB of data, both from and to the internal storage. Throttling is prevented where possible to see how each drive operates under ideal conditions. While game load times should not vary significantly from drive to drive, our results can indicate which drives may be more responsive over time.

The Blue SN5100 uses the PCIe 4.0 interface, making it a good choice for the PS5 (PCIe 5.0 SSDs are overkill for the PS5), as it hits that maximum bandwidth potential with plenty of performance under the hood. While QLC flash technically has higher latency than TLC, long-term reads will not come from the temporary pSLC cache; optimizations and software bottlenecks have made this moot. As you saw in our 3DMark and PCMark 10 sections, the Blue SN5100 is quite capable of being a responsive drive in normal situations. If this drive is priced right at higher capacities, we see it as an absolute win for console users, especially as the drive runs cool without any modification.

Transfer Rates — DiskBench

We use the DiskBench storage benchmarking tool to test file transfer performance with a custom, 50GB dataset. We write 31,227 files of various types, such as pictures, PDFs, and videos to the test drive, then make a copy of that data to a new folder, and follow up with a reading test of a newly-written 6.5GB zip file. This is a real world type workload that fits into the cache of most drives.

Our DiskBench testing gives a peek at read, write, and copy performance with a real-world file transfer. Due to how flash operates, reads will be faster than writes, so you can usually gauge the copy speed from just the write speed. Smaller transfers, including this 50GB dataset, will usually be fully in the pSLC cache, so the results here are under ideal circumstances. We have to mention that, as the Blue SN5100 is a QLC-based drive, and larger transfers with a fuller drive can and will copy more slowly.

With that out of the way, we see the T500 come out on top, with the Blue SN5100 impressively coming in second. It performs effectively the same as the Black SN7100, which is not surprising given that the two drives use very similar hardware. The T500 utilizes six-plane flash and features DRAM, making it difficult to beat here. The P310 uses the same generation of Micron flash, but in QLC with just four planes. BiCS8 is also a four-plane design, which may be one reason it has better latency, while Micron’s newest flash is more bandwidth-focused. This includes the newest QLC flash – we’re working on getting a Micron 2600 sample so we can better elaborate on this.

If you lean more towards latency and especially power efficiency, then the Blue SN5100 makes a lot of sense. It puts the P310 in its place, and the latency gap might only grow with Micron’s newer QLC flash. Then again, the 2600 has flexible caching, which breaks this discussion wide open once we get to PCIe 5.0. It’s just difficult to recommend the P310 over the Blue SN5100 at the same price when the latter is just better balanced in hardware in our opinion. That’s saying something because the P310 is already an immensely popular drive that hit all the right notes in our review.

Synthetic Testing — ATTO / CrystalDiskMark

ATTO and CrystalDiskMark (CDM) are free and easy-to-use storage benchmarking tools that SSD vendors commonly use to assign performance specifications to their products. Both of these tools give us insight into how each device handles different file sizes and at different queue depths for both sequential and random workloads.

The Blue SN5100 performs smoothly with only minor dips at 2MiB for read and write workloads in the ATTO benchmark. The Black SN7100, in comparison, retains its curve at the highest block sizes for reads. This could be due to differences in the QLC and TLC flash, respectively. We do have to point out that the P310, on the whole, is more consistent here, although it’s unlikely you will be transferring data at very specific sizes.

We’ve already seen in DiskBench that a real-world transfer favors the Blue SN5100. Moreover, at the typical 1MB block size in CrystalDiskMark, the Blue SN5100 offers excellent sequential performance regardless of queue depth. You will be able to eke out more with the Black SN7100’s TLC flash for writes, though. If we have to leave a caveat here, it’s this: we’re only looking at 2TB+ performance, and at lower capacities, the P310 should perform more favorably.

For latency, we see that BiCS8’s ability to be in a class of its own for QD1 random 4K reads carries over to the QLC version of the flash. It’s not as good as the TLC on the Black SN7100, but it’s darn good compared to the rest of the drives on this list. If this is the metric you care about most, then you can probably stop reading here and be satisfied in picking up one of the two WD drives. You would still have to read the entire review to see where to buy one over the other, though.

For write latency, we see these fall behind the P310, Rocket 4, and T500. The T500 is understandable as it’s using DRAM, and the Rocket 4 is using BiCS6 TLC flash with the excellent Phison E27T controller. The one result that might confuse is the P310, but we are reminded that Micron’s 232-Layer QLC flash on the drive is four-plane with optimizations for this kind of workload. Writes are usually in pSLC mode, so performance can be deceptive. To be fair to the P310, this result bolsters its application as a primary or singular drive, where frequent updates may be common. That said, we think any one of these drives would be adequate for everyday use.

Sustained Write Performance and Cache Recovery

Official write specifications are only part of the performance picture. Most SSDs implement a write cache, which is a fast area of pseudo-SLC (single-bit) programmed flash that absorbs incoming data. Sustained write speeds can suffer tremendously once the workload spills outside of the cache and into the "native" TLC (three-bit) or QLC (four-bit) flash. Performance can suffer even more if the drive is forced to fold, which is the process of migrating data out of the cache in order to free up space for further incoming data.

We use Iometer to hammer the SSD with sequential writes for 15 minutes to measure both the size of the write cache and performance after the cache is saturated. We also monitor cache recovery via multiple idle rounds. This process shows the performance of the drive in various states as well as the steady state write performance.

The Blue SN5100 uses Sandisk’s nCache 4.0 technology, which is also used in many of the most recent WD and Sandisk SSDs. This is a hybrid pSLC cache, meaning that the cache has both static and dynamic portions. This is similar to Samsung’s TurboWrite technology. The static portion lies outside of user space and is, as a result, is relatively small, but this cache is always available regardless of the amount of data stored on the drive. Being separate from the rest of the flash and cache, it provides a way to handle smaller and random writes in a portion of the drive that usually has much higher endurance. It also helps defer or combine writes in a way that reduces overall wear. The dynamic portion of the cache, on the other hand, will vary in size with the amount of data stored on the drive. The maximum cache size will also vary with overall drive capacity.

In our testing, the 2TB SKU of the Blue SN5100 was able to write at 6.45 GB/s for over 78 seconds. The cache is over 500GB, which is close to the maximum amount possible for a 2TB drive of QLC flash. QLC flash operates in a 4-bit mode, while the pSLC cache operates in a 1-bit mode; therefore, the cache is necessarily at most one-quarter the size of all flash.

The full amount of flash on a drive is more than is available to the user, and there must be accounting for the decimal versus binary capacity discrepancy. It’s likely that having a static portion for caching reduces the amount available for the dynamic portion, in part because the controller does need extra space for system functions and to have free blocks for future writes. Sandisk also appears capable of performing some magic with caching, given the Black SN8100's high steady-state write performance.

If, for some reason, you exhaust the cache, the drive is then forced to write directly to the QLC flash and/or will hit a slower folding state where it must wait for flash to be moved over from the cache in order to free up needed space. This yields a steady state write rate of 442 MB/s, which is low but not bad for QLC flash. The other QLC-based drives in our test did worse, including the P310, except for the Blue SN5000, which has more dies to work with at 4TB. The Black SN7100 is less than double the Blue SN5100’s speed, but we don’t know the raw difference in flash speed. Usually, TLC flash is about 2.5 to 3 times faster than QLC, but both of these drives are using very large caches and are no doubt tuned differently than the eight-channel, DRAM-equipped Black SN8100.

To bring things back into focus: this drive is slow when the cache is full, but it’s still fast enough to hang with SATA SSDs. You shouldn’t really be getting to that point with a budget drive. However, if you care about sustained performance, there are many better drives available. You always want to be looking for TLC flash in that case, and usually smaller caches. The Crucial P510 is almost a perfect example, even though it’s four-channel and DRAM-less. You want DRAM and eight channels for the heaviest tasks. That’s not the audience for the Blue SN5100, though. This drive is made for light use, for laptops, as a gaming drive, etc. It has enough performance here for that, even in suboptimal conditions.

Power Consumption and Temperature

We use the Quarch HD Programmable Power Module to gain a deeper understanding of power characteristics. Idle power consumption is an important aspect to consider, especially if you're looking for a laptop upgrade as even the best ultrabooks can have mediocre stock storage. Desktops may be more performance-oriented with less support for power-saving features, so we show the worst-case.

Some SSDs can consume watts of power at idle while better-suited ones sip just milliwatts. Average workload power consumption and max consumption are two other aspects of power consumption but performance-per-watt, or efficiency, is more important. A drive might consume more power during any given workload, but accomplishing a task faster allows the drive to drop into an idle state more quickly, ultimately saving energy.

For temperature recording we currently poll the drive’s primary composite sensor during testing with a ~22°C ambient. Our testing is rigorous enough to heat the drive to a realistic ceiling temperature.

One thing we want to get out of the way before we dig into the data: we’ve listed Sandisk’s official power numbers in our table on the first page of the review. This is something we may continue to do moving forward with datasheets that indicate this information. Generally, we prefer to look at our real-world results, but in this case, Sandisk lists both read and write average power use – 4.1W for each on the 2TB. Our write-heavy testing peaked at 4.12W with an average of around 3W. As far as we’re concerned, that means Sandisk is bang-on with their data. The S.M.A.R.T. reading indicates the drive can peak up to 5W, but this information is not always reliable, and we tend to measure peaks at a more realistic value.

The Blue SN5100 is, as expected, fantastically power-efficient. There’s no question this drive is a great choice if you are at all worried about power draw or thermal output. The controller in use here is not the most efficient design on paper, but Sandisk’s ability to tune it for a specific purpose makes for a great pairing with the very power-efficient BiCS8 flash. This flash isn’t running full bore, and this is a PCIe 4.0 drive, so that does help to some degree, but PCIe 5.0 drives can finish our workload faster and do quite well. Consider that the Sandisk WD Black SN8100 is on par in power efficiency with the Blue SN5100. This demonstrates how effective optimization can be when you tune with scalable hardware.

Our test bench will run cooler than many systems – the ambient would be higher with heavy CPU and GPU loads in an enclosed case, depending on the cooling solution – but it’s still a predictable way to compare different drives. The Blue SN5100 hit a maximum temperature of 53°C during our write test, which is approximately 37°C below the serious throttling point. This drive is simply a gold mine for laptop and HTPC users, and for full-length capable portable computer systems users. Many, if not most, of these are still running PCIe 4.0 slots will have read-heavy workloads, which favors QLC flash just fine. This might be better as a secondary drive for a serious desktop PC build, though.

Test Bench and Testing Notes

We use an Alder Lake platform with most background applications such as indexing, Windows updates, and anti-virus disabled in the OS to reduce run-to-run variability. Each SSD is prefilled to 50% capacity and tested as a secondary device. Unless noted, we use active cooling for all SSDs.

Sandisk WD Blue SN5100 Bottom Line

It wasn’t that long ago that we gave the Crucial P310 a 4/5 star rating, which is exceptional for a budget-oriented, QLC-based SSD. We do judge drives both relatively and absolutely, which means that sometimes the score may seem out of place. The Blue SN5100 is one such situation where it feels better than the P310 on the whole, but nothing in its DNA screams that it’s a 4.5 drive. One reason for this is that the Blue SN5100 right now is priced far too high to make it competitive with the fast-selling P310. Another reason is that you have the Black SN7100 with TLC flash at a very good price. We gave that drive a 3/5 because its performance was frankly last-gen, but in lieu of the price trends that came after – with QLC flash especially being less competitive – you could put it above the P310 and Blue SN5100.

On the other hand, the Blue SN5100 often performs above its weight class and gives the Black SN7100 a run for its money. At an appropriate price point, it simply is the better drive. Most users will never experience its slowest state – which, to be honest, isn’t even that bad – and it’s one cool customer. You can integrate it into any system and expect good results without needing to adjust cooling or other settings. That’s also true of the Black SN7100, but we feel that the Blue SN5100 is a better fit for its specific market segment. It’s a great secondary or game drive at up to 4TB, and when the pricing is corrected – WD and Sandisk have been aggressive here recently – it should deliver an experience equal to the Black SN7100 at a lower price. That’s why this drive gets a higher score.

If you want TLC flash, you would go with the Black SN7100, right? Well, frankly, there are better TLC-based drives like the Rocket 4 if you actually are worried about sustained write performance, for instance. The Black SN7100’s greatest strength is its power efficiency, which is great for laptops but less meaningful in desktops. Its saving grace is that it’s priced so aggressively. On an even field, it’s simply an average drive overall. And the market agrees with us because not only is Crucial’s P310 selling well, but there is a history of “cheap” drives selling well going back to the P3 Plus and the P2 before that. People want inexpensive drives. We think the P310 delivers on that, but if prices are equal, we would favor the Blue SN5100, so take that into consideration.

If you want this general range of performance with power efficiency but demand DRAM, then the Crucial T500 remains the way to go. It has some issues with sustained writes, which, if important to you, means you should consider something more high-end, such as the WD Black SN850X or Samsung 990 Pro. Drives based on Phison’s E18 also apply, but recent reports of firmware-caused sluggishness persist. The good news is that Phison has fixed firmware coming to its drives. If you’re looking the other way to even cheaper drives, then there are still mid-range champions like the WD Black SN770 and Blue SN5000, but they must be less expensive to make sense. Many other drives in that segment have varying hardware, which can be unpredictable.

Aside from competing for a spot on our Best SSDs list, we can confidently state that the Blue SN5100 is impressive on its own. BiCS8 flash continues to exceed our expectations in performance, especially latency, and power efficiency alike. Sandisk’s controllers also remain well-optimized and reliable. This is the perfect type of QLC-based drive you could ask for, without any real weaknesses. Even the caching is pretty solid. Our only real complaint is price. This drive has to come back down to earth. If it can do that, then we can highly recommend it as the best in its class.

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Kioxia is working with Nvidia to build a solid-state drive that would deliver 100 million random IOPS already in 2027, the company said at a news conference earlier this month, Nikkei reports. Nvidia reportedly plans to use a couple of such SSDs — totalling a whopping 200 million IOPS — attached directly to its GPUs to boost AI performance.

"We will proceed with development in accordance with the proposals and requests from Nvidia," said Koichi Fukuda, chief technology officer of Kioxia's SSD division.

100 million IOPS SSD

Kioxia's drives with 100 million random read speeds are projected to use a PCIe 7.0 interface to connect to GPUs in a peer-to-peer mode and will be exclusively designed for use in AI servers that need to access and process vast amounts of data quickly.

Today's high-end solid-state drives can deliver around 3 million 4K random IOPS, but to meet the performance needs of modern and upcoming GPUs — which are optimized for burst memory access — they need to get substantially faster and change the way they interact with NAND media.

Earlier this year, Silicon Motion's CEO Wallace Kou told Tom's Hardware that Nvidia was interested in building SSDs that offer as many as 100 million random IOPS, 33 times more than existing drives can deliver. Around the same time, Kioxia disclosed plans to build XL-Flash-based 'AI SSDs' with over 10 million 512K random read IOPS in the second half of 2026.

AI workloads rely on frequent, small, random reads to retrieve embeddings, model parameters, or database entries. In such cases, 512-byte blocks better represent actual usage patterns than 4KB blocks and provide lower latency. While drives that operate 512B blocks may not deliver the same raw bandwidth as typical SSDs with 4K blocks, it is easier to scale out sequential read/write speeds with multiple drives than to lower the latencies of conventional SSDs.

It remains to be seen whether Kioxia's AI SSD with a 10 million 512K IOPS random performance will materialize in 2026 if Kioxia plans to build drives with a 100 million IOPS random performance in 2027.

Using XL-Flash?

What is interesting is how exactly Kioxia plans to build its 100 million IOPS drive. Its proposed AI SSD is based on XL-Flash, which is SLC NAND memory with high endurance, very low latency, and fairly high performance. Kioxia's XL-Flash devices feature 16 planes (up significantly from 3 to 6 planes on modern 3D NAND devices for client PCs), which points to higher sequential and random performance. As Kioxia does not publish specifications of XL-Flash, it is impossible to judge the per-device performance of this memory type.

Meanwhile, considering that an Innogrit Tacoma-based 400GB XL-Flash SSD with 32 NAND dies (with seven allocated for overprovisioning) and a PCIe 5.0 x4 interface delivers 3.5 million random read IOPS and 0.5 million random write IOPS, we can estimate that each die contributes up to 109,375 random read IOPS and 15,625 random write IOPS—though this calculation comes with some caveats.

Assuming perfect linear scaling across loads of NAND devices, a 100 million 512B IOPS SSD would require 915 of such dies (presuming the same levels of over provisioning). Now that Kioxia knows how to pack 32 NAND ICs into a single package, it can certainly build a drive based on 915 XL-Flash ICs (in 28 packages). Such a drive would require a special controller with at least a PCIe 5.0 x16 host interface (though PCIe 7.0 x4 would be more preferable). The problem is, there is no perfect linear scaling. Real-world performance of NAND devices in SSDs is limited by channel bandwidth, multi‑plane constraints, command pipelining/overheads, queue depth, firmware, and loads of other factors. Hence, the best case scenario for a 100 million 512B IOPS SSD featuring XL-Flash devices is a multi-controller module with dozens of controllers and a switch. Such a solution may well make sense in all-flash arrays, but Kioxia is explicitly talking about an SSD.

Welcome, HBF?

Sandisk and SK hynix have just signed a memorandum of understanding to collaborate on what could become a pivotal advancement in AI memory infrastructure. Announced in a press release, this agreement aims to standardize “High Bandwidth Flash” (HBF), a NAND flash-based memory technology built into HBM-like packages. This marks the first serious industry push to fuse flash and DRAM-like bandwidth into a single stack, potentially transforming how AI models access and process data at scale.

Unlike traditional HBM, which relies exclusively on DRAM, HBF substitutes parts of the memory stack with NAND flash—trading raw latency for significantly higher capacity and non-volatility. The approach allows HBF to deliver up to 8–16x the capacity of DRAM-based HBM, at comparable costs, while still targeting similar bandwidth levels. Unlike DRAM, which requires constant power to retain data, NAND is non-volatile, enabling persistent storage with reduced energy demands.

That distinction is critical as AI inference scales out to more energy-constrained deployments. Hyperscalers (companies with massive cloud infrastructure for rent) are now pushing inference to the edge, and cooling budgets in AI data centers are already hitting practical limits.

A couple of years ago, a widely-discussed research paper titled “LLM in a Flash” proposed an architecture where large language models could be efficiently run by using SSDs as an additional memory tier, offloading some of the memory pressure from DRAM. Therefore, by marrying NAND flash’s high capacity with interface designs inspired by HBM’s bandwidth capabilities, Sandisk and SK hynix are effectively proposing a new memory class — one that could support large model inference without incurring the thermal and cost overheads of traditional HBM stacks.

The move is also aligned with broader industry shifts. Samsung, for instance, recently unveiled its own flash-backed AI storage tier dubbed “PBSSD” and is actively working on next-gen HBM4 DRAM expected to include logic die integration and potentially hybrid stacks. Meanwhile, Nvidia's roadmap through its Rubin and Vera GPUs continues to rely heavily on HBM, and integrating flash may offer a path to scale memory without linearly scaling cost and power. You can see our deep-dive into HBM roadmaps for Samsung, Micron, SK hynix to learn more.

Sandisk’s HBF prototype, shown at the Flash Memory Summit 2025, was developed using its proprietary BiCS NAND and CBA wafer bonding technologies. The company received the “Most Innovative Technology” award at the event, and announced the formation of a Technical Advisory Board to guide HBF’s development and ecosystem strategy. The board includes figures from both inside and outside Sandisk, underscoring the company's intent to establish HBF as a cross-industry standard, not just a proprietary product.

Raja Koduri continues to push his high bandwidth vision for computing, but this time it's flash, namely HBF (High-Bandwidth Flash) from Sandisk. On Wednesday, the former graphics architect at S3, Apple, AMD (twice), and Intel, announced that he had joined Sandisk’s HBF Technical Advisory Board to guide development and strategy for High-Bandwidth Flash memory technology. Sandisk also shared a press release confirming Koduri’s new role, as well as the appointment of Professor David Patterson to the board.

In case you missed it, Sandisk outlined its newest flash memory innovation back in February this year. Dubbed HBF, the key feature of this flash would be the enabling of GPU packing up to 4TB of VRAM – with more to come in future revisions.

Of course, this isn’t for enthusiasts (yet), but the proponents of HBF want to unleash this huge memory pool attached to a GPU for AI inference workloads. When it was announced, we learned that HBF would weave its magic using multiple high-capacity, high-performance flash core dies, interconnected using through-silicon vias (TSVs), on top of a logic die that can access flash arrays (or rather flash sub-arrays) in parallel. Thus, it would “deliver 8-16X [VRAM] capacity at similar cost.” It relies on BICS 3D NAND using the CMOS directly bonded to Array (CBA) design that bonds a 3D NAND memory array on top of an I/O die made using logic process technology.

Sandisk has just unveiled its brand new WD Black NVMe SSD, which it says is the world's fastest PCIe Gen 5.0 NVMe SSD on the market. The Sandisk WD Black SN8100 NVMe SSD promises speeds of up to 14,900MB/s and capacities of up to 8TB for gaming, content creation, and, of course, AI.

The company says the PCIe Gen 5.0 SSD is built for hardcore gamers. Not only is it rapid, but Sandisk says the Gen 5.0 model is 100% more power efficient than its PCIe Gen 4.0 SSD.

The new SN8100 also features Sandisk BiCS8 TLC 3D CBA NAND technology, which brings a lower profile and should improve thermal performance.

The spec listed sequential speeds for read and write are 14,900MB/s and 14,000MB/s, respectively, which would give our current best SSD for speed, the Crucial T705, a run for its money. Sandisk also promises 2,300,000 IOPS of random performance on the 2TB and 4TB models, all while averaging just 7W of power draw.

Sandisk's CEO, David Goeckeler, has been boasting about a formidable new SSD controller dubbed Stargate. Combining Stargate with the latest BiCS8 Quad Level Cell (QLC) NAND, the company has a "dynamite project" in its hands, teased Goeckeler. ComputerBase reports (machine translation) that this should mean some massive capacity SSDs are on the way, scaling up to 512TB drives in 2027.

We don't have much in the way of technical details about the Stargate controller at this time, but we can read between the lines of the CEO's statement, and ponder over previous announcements and roadmaps. "We have a new architecture coming out in the next couple of quarters that we call Stargate, new ASIC, clean sheet design and then, with BiCS 8 QLC … we just think that’s going to be a dynamite project," ComputerBase attributes this statement to Goeckeler, taken from a recent investor Q&A session.

Based on the above, it may well be that Sandisk is going to leverage the Stargate controller and BiCS8 NAND in 128TB SSDs in the new DC SN670 data center drives, starting from Q3 this year. Moreover, roadmaps indicate that Sandisk aims to market 256TB drives the next year, and double up again with 512TB drives in 2027. The DC SN670 enterprise series SSDs were previously flagged as PCIe 5.0, but there is also the possibility that Stargate will be a technology that renews the series with up to a PCIe 6.0 interface.

The recently imposed U.S. import duties are designed to affect the vast majority of industries, and the data storage industry is certainly not an exception. Because the underlying technologies of hard disk drives, solid-state drives, tape drives, and storage arrays are so different, the effects of tariffs could be diverse on all of them.

And it looks like HDD and SSD makers will suffer the most despite Trump’s 90-day suspension of country-specific tariffs starting April 10, whereas producers of tapes will rejoice, notes Blocks & Files.

HDDs

We are going to start with hard drives, as these are arguably the most technologically advanced storage devices with the most complex supply chain these days. There are three HDD makers: Seagate, Toshiba, and Western Digital.

Seagate's HDD operation involves product development in the U.S. and Singapore; head manufacturing in the United States and Northern Ireland; substrate production in Malaysia; media fabrication in Singapore or Japan (when Seagate sourced platters from Showa Denko); and drive and subassembly manufacturing in China and Thailand.

Toshiba's HDD supply chain involves R&D and high-value component manufacturing in Japan (as the company usually uses media from Showa Denko), with mass assembly and component integration primarily based in China, the Philippines, and Japan (high-end HDDs).

Western Digital develops its HDDs in the U.S. and Japan. Media substrates are produced in Malaysia, but the actual media manufacturing occurs in China or Japan (when Western Digital sources from Showa). Head wafers are processed in the U.S., but the final head-gimbal assembly takes place in the Philippines and Thailand. Actual HDDs are built in Malaysia and Thailand.

Although Seagate, Toshiba, and Western Digital have different supply chains, their setups are subject to risks of substantial U.S. import tariffs, particularly on drives produced in China (124%), Malaysia (24%), the Philippines (17%), and Thailand (36%). Perhaps, if Toshiba shifts more production to the Philippines, it can avoid paying extremely high tariffs in the U.S., but the situation for Seagate is more complicated as a significant portion of Seagate's drives are built in China. Keeping in mind that HDDs are assembled in cleanrooms, moving their assembly away from China or Thailand quickly will be expensive and complicated.

Considering the diverse supply chains of all three makers, it is likely that U.S. customs will charge import tariffs based on where the final HDDs are assembled. Seagate and Western Digital will likely increase their operations in the U.S. to prove that there is 20% of American content in their drives to cut down duties, though it remains to be seen whether they succeed.

SSDs

With SSDs, the situation is a bit different. There are only six companies in the world that produced 3D NAND memory in high-volume — Kioxia, Micron, Sandisk, Samsung, SK hynix, and YMTC — but there are dozens of SSD makers, most of which conduct operations in China and other countries with low labor costs.

Micron, Kioxia, and Sandisk are the only big makers of 3D NAND, which do not have wafer fabrication capacity in China. However, these companies use their Chinese facilities to test and package their flash memory. Under U.S. Customs law, the 'country of origin' is generally determined by the location of the last substantial transformation, the point where the product undergoes a major change. So, if a 3D NAND wafer is fabricated in Japan or Singapore but diced, tested, and packaged in China, the origin of flash is very likely to be considered China.

For now, this is not a problem as memory is now relieved from tariffs. However, Micron, Kioxia, and Sandisk produce SSDs in China and drives are considered 'finished goods' and are therefore dutiable. Hence, to avoid punitive tariffs from the U.S. government, these companies will have to start making their drives elsewhere to remain competitive in the U.S. This applies to third-party SSD makers too. Fortunately, it is relatively easy to establish assembly of SSDs as it does not require cleanrooms used to make 3D NAND memory or assemble HDDs.

The lion's share of Samsung's and SK hynix's 3D NAND is made in South Korea, but they also have 3D NAND production capacity in China, mostly to serve local demand for flash memory and SSDs. However, retail SSDs from Samsung and SK hynix are assembled in South Korea, so the U.S. Customs will likely deem them as Korean products subject to a 25% import tariff (a 15% country-specific tariff is suspended for 90 days effective April 10).

For obvious reasons, 3D NAND companies will unlikely ship products containing 3D NAND memory from China to the U.S. to avoid tariffs once semiconductors are slapped with import duties. However, it remains to be seen what SK Hynix's subsidiary Solidigm will do, considering the fact that it exclusively uses memory produced at the company's Dalian facility (which used to belong to Intel). If the U.S. government decides to impose prohibitive tariffs on 3D NAND chips made in China, Solidigm will be in trouble. The same applies to Micron, Kioxia, and Sandisk.

To avoid punitive country-specific tariffs when shipping SSDs to the U.S. once the country-specific tariffs are re-instated in 90 days following the April 9 pause, makers of SSDs will have to either assemble them in countries that are not subject to such import duties (e.g., those protected under the USMCA, such as Canada or Mexico), or will have to build them in the U.S. This will not relieve 3D NAND makers (or their customers) from paying import duties on memory and controller chips once they are imposed though. However, unlike makers of HDDs, SSD producers can change the origin of their products relatively easily.

Tape and optical discs

Tape drives and optical discs see different effects. IBM builds LTO tape drives in Arizona and escapes tariffs, aside from imported parts. Japan's Fujifilm makes tape in Massachusetts, so it is also safe, but Sony produces them in Japan, so it must deal with a 24% charge on tapes brought to the U.S.

Blu-ray and DVD discs are manufactured in China, India, Japan, and Taiwan. Each country's specific rate will apply when shipping these items to the U.S. and it is unlikely that anyone will relocate production of discs to America. What remains to be seen is how tariffs affect pre-recorded discs with games and movies.

Expanding storage on your PC doesn't mean you have to go broke in the process. There are a few notable deals out there offering quality gaming and productivity boosting SSDs at a discounted rate. Today, we have come across an example of such an offer on the Sandisk 1TB Extreme SSD. This M.2 NVMe PCIe Gen4 drive usually goes for around $99, but right now it's available for just $59. It's important to note that this is for an internal M.2 SSD, not to be confused with the Sandisk Extreme Portable line.

The Sandisk 1TB Extreme SSD is definitely a quality drive, but we haven't had the opportunity to review this model for ourselves yet. Therefore, you won't find it in our best SSDs list. However, we still recommend perusing this list to see what drives are leading the market and to help you get a better understanding of how this drive stacks up against other similar SSDs on the market.

When it comes to choosing an SSD, speed is king. It's important to snag a drive capable of reaching high speeds to get some of the best performance possible. The Sandisk 1TB Extreme is far from the fastest on the market, but it definitely has plenty to offer, landing somewhere in the middle ground with read/write speeds around 5,150 / 4,900 MBps. It comes in an M.2 2280 form factor, which means it fits the most popular internal SSD form factor standard (22x 80mm), fitting inside most desktop and many laptop PCs with M.2 slots.

This offer is for the 1TB edition – that said, you can also purchase this drive in a 500GB model and a 2TB model. All the drives in this line have the same form factor and are compatible with NVMe PCIe Gen4 interfaces. The purchase is supported by both Amazon's 30-day return policy as well as a 5-year manufacturer's warranty from Sandisk that voids should the drive reach 600TBW.

If you want to check out this deal for yourself, visit the Sandisk 1TB Extreme product page at Amazon for more details and purchase options.

Among the things that Sandisk discussed last week at its Investor Day were upcoming UltraQLC-based 1PB (1 petabyte) solid-state drives, as well as some unanticipated talks about 3D DRAM, which is not about to happen quite yet, according to Sandisk (the roadmap target lacks a date).

UltraQLC and 1PB SSDs

Let us start from the UltraQLC platform that will eventually enable 1PB SSDs. Just as the name suggests, UltraQLC is not a type of memory per se, but a mix of Sandisk's BICS 8 QLC 3D NAND, a very advanced proprietary controller with a whopping 64 NAND channel, and firmware. In fact, the custom-designed controller is central to UltraQLC as it incorporates domain-specific hardware accelerators that offload critical storage functions from firmware, reducing latency, enabling higher bandwidth, and improving reliability for hyperscale storage needs, according to Sandisk. The controller also dynamically scales power based on workload demand, ensuring optimal energy efficiency. The chip also has an advanced bus multiplexer that manages increased data load from high-density 3D QLC NAND memory stacks, allowing full channel utilization without sacrificing performance.

 "UltraQLC [is] custom built based on our decades of experience and our current learnings to really be deployed in the modern data infrastructure while not compromising on density, performance, and power efficiency," said Khurram Ismail the incoming chief of Engineering and Product Management at Sandisk. "It is really built around those three things: […] BICS 8 NAND technology [and future NAND too], customized controllers, and advanced system design."

For now, the UltraQLC SSDs are set to leverage 2Tb NAND memory ICs to enable 128TB capacities. Technically, a 64-channel controller could enable higher capacity, but at the cost of performance. But Sandisk has higher-capacity NAND memory devices incoming, so the company envisions 256TB, 512TB, and eventually 1PB drives in the coming years.

3D DRAM, not now

When it comes to AI and other high-performance computing, there is the so-called memory wall as AI training needs abundant memory capacity. Typical DRAM scaling may no longer meet the needs of AI training demands, says Sandisk.

The memory wall problem — the widening gap between what applications need and what technology can deliver — is exacerbating cost pressures in AI and computing. Large language models (LLMs) are growing 10x every 1-2 years, requiring massive increases in memory performance. This is where Sandisk 3D DRAM comes into place.

 "This work has been going on for quite some time, but the technological challenges have been pretty daunting and there is no clear line of sight to getting to 3D DRAM right now in the industry," said Alper Ilkbahar, memory technology chief at SanDisk.

To address this issue, three potential solutions were outlined. The first is the brute-force investment approach, which involves throwing more money into DRAM scaling, despite diminishing returns. The second is 3D DRAM, an attempt to scale DRAM vertically, similar to 3D NAND, but significant technological challenges make it an uncertain path. The third and preferred approach is developing new scalable memory technologies (such as HBF), which Sandisk has been actively pursuing as an alternative to traditional DRAM scaling limitations.

As Sandisk and Western Digital are preparing for a split, both brands — which are technically still Western Digital Corp. — both companies held their Investor Days last week, where they revealed a number of unexpected things. We have already covered High Bandwidth Flash from Sandisk and heat dot magnetic recording (HDMR) technology.

Sandisk has announced a new SSD set to max out PCIe 5.0 speeds at 7W power draw, comparable to the max power draw of many modern Gen4 drives. The company, fresh off a rebrand and now the SSD/flash storage wing of Western Digital, will launch this flagship drive as part of its rollout of two new consumer SSD platforms.

At its Investor Day 2025 presentation, Sandisk (formerly SanDisk) introduced shareholders to its new position as a home exclusively for flash-based storage, positioned opposite the HDD-only Western Digital. To return to the market and adopt Western Digital's SSD products, Sandisk is launching two new SSD platforms; one is built on QLC NAND based on value, and the other is built on TLC NAND for performance.

The performance platform fully utilizes PCIe Gen 5 along with Western Digital and Kioxia's new BiCS8 3D NAND technology. The first flagship drive in this family, yet unnamed, will saturate the PCIe 5.0 connection with 14,500 MB/s sequential read and 14,000 MB/s write speeds at a max power draw of only 7W in its 2TB flavor. Shipping in Q2 2025, the drive will launch in capacities ranging from 512GB to 4TB.

The most impressive number here is the 7W power draw, which would make the drive the most efficient full-speed Gen 5 SSD on the market at launch. Most Gen 4 drives today hover around this power draw, with some performance Gen 4 drives still exceeding it, while the best Gen 5 drives today are often closer to 10W maximum. Speculation holds that the drive may be one of the first retail drives fitted with Silicon Motion's SM2508 controller, a shockingly power-efficient controller whose reference drive is the second-most efficient drive in our testing history.

"This is absolutely going to be the best-in-class product in the industry," shared Khurram Ismail, the new Senior VP of Engineering and Product Management. "The gamers and OEMs are going to love this product."

Sandisk's performance TLC-based platform will be home to the above drive and will also host the WD Black family of gaming SSDs, which are currently for sale on Sandisk's website. The value-oriented QLC platform, still on PCIe 4.0, will also see an upgrade to BiCS8 3D NAND and will be seen in 512GB, 1TB, and 2TB sizes. One new drive in this family will be the Western Digital PC SN5100S, which is expected to have 53% faster random read speeds and 44% faster random writes than the Western Digital PC SN5000S.

In the same leg of its presentation, Sandisk also shared its plans for scaling up its use of QLC NAND and PCIe 5.0 across its entire lineup. While QLC NAND is generally seen as worse for performance than TLC due to its shorter lifespan, Sandisk plans to have 75% of its offerings ship with QLC NAND by 2028, focusing on its potential to boost capacity. Sandisk also stated its intention to phase out PCIe Gen 4 production by 2028, moving wholly to Gen 5 releases by then.

While it will be interesting to see new drives released with both Sandisk and WD branding on the same package, Sandisk is certainly optimistic about its return to the storage industry. At the same Investor Day meeting, Sandisk also shared its goals to enter the GPU memory space, with its newly-announced High Bandwidth Flash memory expected to put up to 4TB of VRAM on a single GPU.

SanDisk on Wednesday introduced an interesting new memory that could wed the capacity of 3D NAND and the extreme bandwidth enabled by high bandwidth memory (HBM). SanDisk's high-bandwidth flash (HBF) memory enables access to multiple high-capacity 3D NAND arrays in parallel, thus providing plenty of bandwidth and capacity. The company positions HBF as a solution for AI inference applications that require high bandwidth and capacity coupled with low power requirements. The first-generation HBF can enable up to 4TB of VRAM capacity on a GPU, and more capacity in future revisions. SanDisk also foresees this tech making its way to cellphones and other types of devices. The company hasn't announced a release date yet.

"We are calling it the HBF technology to augment HBM memory for AI inference workloads," said Alper Ilkbahar, memory technology chief at SanDisk. "We are going to match the bandwidth of HBM memory while delivering 8 to 16 times capacity at a similar cost point."

Conceptually, HBF is similar to HBM. It stacks multiple high-capacity, high-performance flash core dies interconnected using through-silicon vias (TSVs) on top of a logic die that can access flash arrays (or rather flash sub-arrays) in parallel. The underlying architecture of HBF is SanDisk's BICS 3D NAND using the CMOS directly bonded to Array (CBA) design that bonds a 3D NAND memory array on top of an I/O die made using logic process technology. That logic may be a key to enabling HBF.

"We challenged our engineers and said, what else could you do with this power of scaling," said Alper Ilkbahar. "The answer they came up with […] was moving to an architecture where we divide up this massive array into many, many arrays and access each of these arrays in parallel. When you do that, you get massive amounts of bandwidth.  Now, what can we build with this? We are going to build high bandwidth flash."

Traditional NAND die designs often treat the core NAND flash memory array as planes, pages, and blocks. A block is the smallest erasable area, and a page is the smallest writable area. HBF seems to break the die into 'many, many arrays' so they can be accessed concurrently. Each sub-array (with its own pages and blocks) presumably has its own dedicated read/write path. While this resembles how multi-plane NAND devices work, the HBF concept seems to go far beyond them.

For now, SanDisk says that its 1st-Gen HBF will use 16 HBF core dies. To enable such devices, SanDisk says that it has invented a proprietary stacking technology that features minimal warpage to enable stacking 16 HBF core dies, and a logic die that can simultaneously access data from multiple HBF core dies. The complexity of logic that can handle hundreds or thousands of concurrent data streams should be higher than that of a typical SSD controller.

Unfortunately, SanDisk does not disclose the actual performance numbers of its HBF products, so we can only wonder whether HBF matches the per-stack performance of the original HBM (~ 128 GB/s) or the shiny new HBM3E, which provides 1 TB/s per stack in the case of Nvidia's B200.

The only thing we know from a SanDisk-provided example is that eight HBF stacks feature 4 TB of NAND memory, so each stack can store 512 GB (21x more than one 8-Hi HBM3E stack that has a capacity of 24 GB). A 16-Hi 512 GB HBF stack means that each HBF core die is a 256 Gb 3D NAND device with some complex logic enabling die-level parallelism. Funneling hundreds of gigabytes of data per second from 16 3D NAND ICs is still quite a big deal, and we can only wonder how SanDisk can achieve that.

What we are sure about is that HBF will never match DRAM in per-bit latency, which is why SanDisk stresses that HBF products are aimed at read-intensive, high-throughput applications, such as big AI inference datasets. For many AI inference tasks, the critical factor is high throughput at a feasible cost rather than the ultra-low latency that HBM (or other types of DRAM) provides. So, while HBF may not replace HBM any time soon, it might occupy a spot on the market that requires high-capacity, high-bandwidth, NAND-like cost but not ultra-low latency. To simplify the transition from HBM, HBF has the same electrical interface with some protocol changes, though HBF is not drop-in compatible with HBM.

" We have tried to make it as close as possible mechanically and electrically to the HBM, but there are going to be minor protocol changes required that need to be enabled at the host devices," said Ilkbahar.

SanDisk didn't touch on write endurance. NAND has a finite lifespan that can only tolerate a certain number of writes. While SLC and pSLC technologies offer higher endurance than the TLC and QLC NAND used in consumer SSDs, this comes at the expense of capacity and adds cost. NAND is also typically written to at block granularity, whereas memory is addressable at the cache line level (i.e. typically 128KB for NAND blocks versus 32 bytes for a cache line). That's another key challenge.

SanDisk has a vision of how its HBF will evolve over three generations. Nonetheless, for now, SanDisk's HBF is largely a work in progress. SanDisk wants HBF to become an open standard with an open ecosystem, so it is forming a technical advisory board consisting of 'industry luminaries and partners.

A little less than a year ago Western Digital announced plans to split its business into two: one would concentrate on hard disk drives, and another would get 3D NAND assets, including the production of memory and related products. Recently the company quietly split its websites: those who want to get an HDD should go to WD.com and those after flash storage should visit SanDisk.com, as noted in a Reddit post. 

As a result of the split, all the company's hard drive products are now available at WD.com, including those that traditionally belonged to Western Digital's family of WD-branded devices as well as G-Technology's external HDDs that over time gained their SanDisk Professional badge. SanDisk, on the other hand, sells all types of 3D NAND flash-based products. We are talking about memory cards, USB drives, and products extending to enterprise-grade SSDs - even those that currently carry the WD trademark. 

In addition to splitting product lines, Western Digital will also split support. Western Digital will keep supporting all HDDs, while SanDisk will keep supporting all NAND-based products.  

"As of today, we are operating two specialized websites: WesternDigital.com for all HDD and platform products and SanDisk.com for all flash products–including SSDs, memory cards, USB flash drives, and more," a statement by Western Digital reads. "In addition, we now have two specialized support websites. Western Digital Support will continue to support all HDDs and platform products while SanDisk Support will support all flash products from the Western Digital family of brands." 

The formal split of Western Digital was set to be completed in the second half of 2024, so it will probably occur over the next several weeks. Since announcing the split in October 2023, Western Digital has made considerable headway, including establishing legal entities across 18 countries and preparing necessary financial structures, the company announced in March. Western Digital also indicated back then that regulatory filings were nearing completion. Once complete, both companies will operate as publicly traded entities with their own capital structures. 

David Goeckeler, the current CEO, will lead the new NAND-focused company, possibly named SanDisk. Irving Tan, currently the executive vice president of global operations, will become the CEO of the standalone HDD company, which will continue to operate under the Western Digital brand. 

The decision to divide the company stems from challenges in managing its diverse product lines and lagging growth in a highly competitive market. Western Digital had become a vertically integrated storage company after acquiring SanDisk and HGST but struggled to grow revenues, especially as demand for hard drives waned and the NAND market became more volatile. This separation is intended to improve operational focus and create two independent, more agile companies.

In many ways, SanDisk's latest backup drive feels like a throwback. As its Desk Drive name implies, it's designed to live solely on your desk, unlike most of the best external SSDs we've tested in recent years. And it requires an external power brick, alongside its USB connection (native USB-C, though a USB-A adapter is included.

This makes the drive feel more like an old-school external desktop hard drive than an SSD, which is as intended since SanDisk positions its Desk Drive SSD  as a replacement for people who've owned backup drives in the past, but want something fast and spacious.

The Desk Drive is definitely faster than a hard drive, as it's a 10 Gbps SSD, and quite spacious for a solid-state drive (4TB and 8TB versions are available at launch). For those who want a single desk-bound plug-in data repository for irreplaceable files and fast access to large project libraries you're working on, it's a solid option – and one without much direct competition in the mainstream storage space. Samsung sells an 8TB T5 Evo drive, but it's about half as fast as the Desk Drive, as we'll see in our testing, and is designed to be portable. SanDisk's drive, at an MSRP of $699, is about $100 more than the current price of the 8TB T5 Evo. But we'd expect street pricing for the Desk Drive to soon fall below its suggested price. Samsung's launch price for its 8TB T5 Evo late last year was $649.  

SanDisk Desk Drive specs 

Design of the SanDisk Desk Drive

At 3.9 inches x 3.9 inches and 1.58 inches tall, with a concave top and an orange stripe running through its black-plastic mid-section, the SanDisk Desk Drive looks more like a set-top streaming box than any external SSD we've tested in recent years. And at 0.59 pounds, it's heavy in a way that's clearly unnecessary from a practical standpoint, other than to keep it from sliding around on your desk – helped by a large rubber-bottomed base. It's also much larger than more traditional external SSDs designed for portability.

From left to right in the image above is Samsung's T5 Evo drive, the SanDisk Desk Drive, Lacie's Rugged Mini SSD, Crucial's X10 Pro, and one of the Best Flash Drives, SK hynix Tube T31.

But weight and size, beyond a certain point at least, isn't generally important for something designed to stay on your desk all the time. The extra heft of the Desk Drive gives it at least a superficial sense of quality, and likely will comfort some users who are transitioning from a similarly heavy external hard drive.

Ports, in the form of USB-C and the power adapter's barrel connector, are around back. It feels like the company missed an opportunity here to add some extra USB ports and turn the drive into a sort of hub. But that would of course raise costs. And as we'll see shortly in our benchmark testing, the Desk Drive uses basically all of its 10 Gbps (USB 3.2 Gen2) bandwidth.

Accessories and Software

The drive doesn't come with much in the way of accessories. Apart from its compact power adapter, you get a USB-C cable, as well as a USB-A adapter that clips onto one end.

For Mac users, the drive supports Time Machine. And for Windows users, there's a link on the drive to download Acronis software, although it's somewhat confusingly named Acronis True Image for Western Digital. WD bought SanDisk back in 2016. But it's likely many of the kinds of users SanDisk is aiming for with this device won't know that, and will be wondering why they're installing backup software designed for what was a competing company.

For those on the Windows side, Acronis True Image has long been a respected program for backing up and cloning drives. You can use it to make full system backups or choose specific folders. The software also includes other tools, like drive cleaning and making rescue media. And while the native Acronis interface looks dated, the skin that WD has built on top of it is clean and intuitive.

I used the software to do a full backup of the boot drive of the system I installed it on, and it took about 10 minutes from start to finish to handle 281GB of files.

Note that Acronis now charges $50 a year for this software, and the license that ships with this drive expires in five years. So for those who will actually make use of a number of these software features, it's a significant added value.

Comparison Products

As an 8TB external SSD, the Desk Drive's only direct competition (outside of multi-drive solutions aimed at enterprise and high-end content creators),, is Samsung's 8TB T5 Evo. It's a lot smaller and more portable in the sense that it's bus-powered, so doesn't need an external power brick. But as we'll see in testing below, it's also a lot slower in most tests than the SanDisk drive.

For a look at what kind of extra speed is available for systems that have faster USB 3.2 Gen2 2x2 ports, we'll also look at the results from Crucial's X10 Pro. That drive is also smaller than both the Desk Drive and Samsung's T5 and is powered solely by its USB port. But like most external SSDs, its capacity tops out at just 4TB.

Trace Testing - PCMark 10 Storage Benchmark

PCMark 10 is a trace-based benchmark that uses a wide-ranging set of real-world traces from popular applications and everyday tasks to measure the performance of storage devices.

SanDisk's drive starts out impressive here, obliterating the T5 Evo, which is hiding at the bottom of the chart, and only being bested by Sabrent's Rocket Nano XTRM, a Thunderbolt drive with basically four times that SanDisk's bandwidth.

Transfer Rates – DiskBench

We use the DiskBench storage benchmarking tool to test real-world file transfer performance with a custom 50GB dataset. We copy 4,617 files (images, videos, and software ISO files) to a folder on the test drive (write). Then, after leaving the system idle for five minutes, we run the same test in reverse, moving the test folder to a different location on our PCIe 4.0 testing drive.

Things look quite different in this real-world file transfer test. The SanDisk drive still easily beats Samsung's T5 Evo, as well as the faster T7 Shield. But other 10 Gbps drives, like Crucial's X9 Pro and our budget SSD favorite, the Silicon Power PX10 do better here. And 20 Gbps options like the X10 Pro and LaCie's Rugged Mini are in another league – as we'd expect due to their higher bandwidth.

Synthetic Testing CrystalDiskMark

CrystalDiskMark (CDM) is a free and easy-to-run storage benchmarking tool that SSD companies commonly use to assign product performance specifications. It gives us insight into how each device handles different file sizes. We run this test at its default settings.

The SanDisk Desk Drive pretty much saturates its 10 Gbps bus in our sequential Crystal DiskMark test, easily topping 1000 MBps in reads and writes. That's enough to beat the two Samsung drives and a couple other contenders, but Silicon Power's PX10 again comes out just slightly ahead.

The Desk Drive again looks good in this random read / write test, beating everything else on reads, save for Sabrent's Thunderbolt drive. On writes, it's not quite as impressive but still delivers solid results – especially compared to the 8TB Samsung T5 Evo, which really struggles here.

Sustained Write Performance

A drive's rated write specifications are only a piece of the performance picture. Most external SSDs (just like their internal counterparts) implement a write cache, or a fast area of flash, programmed to perform like faster SLC, that absorbs incoming data.

Sustained write speeds often suffer tremendously when the workload saturates the cache and slips into the "native" TLC or QLC flash. We use Iometer to hammer the SSD with sequential writes for 15 minutes to measure the size of the write cache and performance after the cache is saturated.

We've stripped a few drives from the above chart, for the sake of clarity. As you can see from its purple line, the SanDisk Desk Drive is remarkably consistent. The drive maintains a write speed of between 1010 and 1017 MB/s throughout our 15-minute test run. In fact, it maintained that through a full 30 minutes of writes. That's not the fastest result we've tested, but it's about the best you can expect from a 10 Gbps drive, and I've never seen an external drive this consistent in its write capabilities.

Conclusion

To those interested in modern portable drives, SanDisk's Desk Drive Desktop SSD is going to seem like an anachronism. Why tie your storage down to a desk and require external power when most external SSDs have been bus-powered and pocketable for years? But the same could be said for desktop PCs when laptops have offered portable computing for decades. And yet, I sit here, typing this on a custom-built desktop because it offers features and a specific kind of convenience that are helpful to my workflow.

The same can be said for SanDisk's Desk Drive. The company envisions it as a local repository for backups and project files that you're actively working on. Its external power requirement  is clunky in some ways, but it means you can basically plug the drive into any USB port, including Type-A, and it will just work (although slower ports will of course mean slower speeds). It also won't drain your battery if you plug it into a laptop to access or offload lots of files.

SanDisk envisions this as the first of a line of drives, with plans for a 16TB Desk Drive by mid-2025. Clearly, the company is confident that there's a market for mainstream desk-bound solid-state storage. And for those who want portable solid-state storage, WD and SanDisk offer several drives with capacities up to 4TB. That said, its portable drives have suffered a reputation hit over the last year or so. Hopefully for SanDisk, the larger footprint of the Desk Drive means any manufacturing issues with previous drives have been avoided here.

If you're after a spacious, desk-bound solid-state drive and you aren't using a desktop where you could just install a couple of 4TB M.2 drives for less, SanDisk's Desk Drive is a unique (at least in its top capacity) and well-performing offering. The 8TB model delivered consistent performance in the 1000 MB/s range in our testing. Samsung offers a portable drive with 8TB of storage for less, but that drive is much slower in both its rated specs and our own testing than SanDisk's drive.

For capacity and speed, the 8TB Desk Drive is tough to beat, although it will be easier to recommend if its street price settles closer to $600 or $650 than its MSRP of $699. But even then, SanDisk might have a tough time convincing most people who have previously owned external hard drives for backup. Because while a spinning platter drive will be much slower and likely more prone to failure, an 8TB external hard drive costs $135-$160. That's a whole lot less than $600-$700.

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Western Digital is facing a class action lawsuit regarding SanDisk Extreme Pro SSD failures and subsequent losses of user data. The class action group is looking for in excess of $5,000,000 plus interest, fees, and costs, the Register reports. California resident Nathan Krum, is named as the plaintiff. 

In May stories popped up about SanDisk Extreme Portable SSDs suffering from sudden failures. A multitude of customers were highlighting data loss problems stemming from their use of this particular family of external SSDs on social media and SanDisk forums. The most common sign that something had gone wrong, and that your SSD had been affected by the data loss issue, was when plugging in you received a message stating "The disk you attached was not readable by this computer." By May, WD / SanDisk admitted it was aware of issues with its external SSDs and promised a firmware update was on the way "soon."

WD seemed to limit its scope of admission regarding the failed drives. In previous reports,  we noted that the storage giant intended to provide firmware updates for the 4TB SanDisk Extreme and / or Extreme Pro portable SSDs (SDSSDE61-4T00 and SDSSDE81-4T00 respectively). However, we saw plenty of comments from people with one of these drives in another capacity (they are available in 500GB, 1TB and 2TB, too), struggling with the same sudden data loss issues. There was no mention of refunds being made available.

The lack of refunds, or mention of fixes other capacity drives, might be what pushed the plaintiff to instigate legal action. Krum says he bought a SanDisk Extreme Pro 2TB model for $179.99 on or about May 19, 2023 from Amazon.com. After the drive failed and the lost data Krum had saved upon it, he says he spent money on data recovery services, and to purchase a replacement external hard drive. Of course, dealing with such issues also requires a substantial amount of personal time and energy. Making matters worse, Krum says he "cannot return it [the SSD] for a full refund," and he "can no longer trust using the drive and thus it is worthless to him."

It's not a good look, as the SanDisk Extreme Pro 2TB is advertised as being "reliable enough to take on any adventure," and "a rugged, dependable storage solution," targeting photographers, videographers, and other creative professionals and hobbyists. Moreover, despite WD's statements about data safety, the plaintiff asserts that there was a known "latent defect in manufacturing and/or design." As well as the misleading advertising complaint, the plaintiff is alleging breach of contract and violation of consumer protection law.

The class action document published by the United States District Court For The Northern District Of California, San Jose Division, also contains some information about the experiences of SanDisk Extreme (Pro) customers since our May report. It states that the firmware updates designed to fix / prevent data loss issues were "unreliable," and that replacement drives sent to customers were "reported to suffer from the same defect."

According to the filing, class members are "All persons in the United States who purchased a SanDisk Extreme Pro SSD portable solid-state hard drive, including the SanDisk Extreme Pro, Extreme Portable, Extreme Pro Portable, and WD MyPassport SSD models, at retail since at least January 2023." There are a few exclusions, such as WD / SanDisk employees and resellers. It is estimated that there will be "tens if not hundreds of thousands of individuals," included.

WD's help pages continue to maintain that the firmware updates released fix a problem where drives "unexpectedly disconnect from a computer." It states that the firmware issue has now been addressed by manufacturing and currently shipping products aren't affected (see FAQ section of linked page).

WD has responded to the growing throng of disgruntled SanDisk Extreme and Extreme Pro portable SSD users who have been through or are facing the frightening prospect of sudden data loss. Ars Technica sought comment from the SanDisk parent company after it noted multiple social media threads complaining of data loss and drives sometimes becoming completely unreadable. SanDisk says that a firmware fix is on the way "soon," but its response only mentions 4TB versions of these portable flash storage devices, and not an update for the 2TB models. 

Prudent computer users buy data storage solutions from the likes of SanDisk to ensure their data is safe and secure. Portable SSDs like the SanDisk Extreme and Extreme Pro series come with the promise of "professional grade storage… rugged… worry-free… dependable" operation for at least five years (the warranty duration). Thus, these portable SSDs should be a good choice for a working data or backup drive.

In recent months, dissatisfaction with the SanDisk Extreme SSD series has grown, as evidenced by reddit threads like this, or this, or this. Symptoms commonly experienced are that after a sustained write to the drive, all the data on the device will appear to have been wiped. Some then find that the drive isn't just empty but has been rendered completely unwritable. Ouch.

An Ars employee has been unfortunate enough to have experienced not one but two (2TB) SanDisk Extreme Pro SSDs dying. In his experience, "a slew of read and write errors" were thrown up after the drives reached about half full. After disconnecting and reconnecting, the drives appeared to be unformatted, and it sounds like the data in place wasn't recoverable. Normally the odds of having two successive drives failing like this would be huge, but WD has admitted there is something wrong with the firmware, and it will issue an update to fix things.

"Western Digital is aware of reports indicating some customers have experienced an issue with 4TB SanDisk Extreme and/or Extreme Pro portable SSDs (SDSSDE61-4T00 and SDSSDE81-4T00 respectively)," wrote the storage tech company, in response to Ars Technica's inquiries. "We have resolved the issue and will publish a firmware update to our website soon. Customers with questions or who are experiencing issues should contact our Customer Support team for assistance."

The WD statement neglects to mention the possibility of refunds, much to some users' chagrin. Additionally, it is unclear whether the lack of mention of 2TB drives is an oversight or whether they will also get updated firmware "soon," as they should.

Some unconfirmed chatter suggests that the SanDisk Extreme SSD issues affect only those using devices "manufactured after November 2022." Still, at the time of writing, we would advise anyone using these drives to use them with extreme caution. Perhaps it is advisable to only use these storage devices for convenient duplicate or temporary data until the fix arrives and it has been tested well.

We can't help but notice that there are some hefty discounts on SanDisk Extreme / Pro SSDs on Amazon right now. However, until the above mess gets sorted out to everyone's satisfaction, buyers should stay clear - even though one of these drives performed very well during our lab testing (March 2021) and gained a place in our Best External SSDs and Hard Drives feature.

The Sabrent Rocket nano V2 portable SSD is a tiny, lightweight drive up to 4TB that you can easily carry around. It’s very similar to the Corsair EX100U in performance and pricing, with some minor differences. Designed to compete with the best external SSDs, It has TLC flash memory, which is nice, and the embedded design means that it is small and efficient. This flash produces solid sustained write performance, a place where the EX100U eventually falls flat, but the weak UFD controller otherwise holds the nano V2’s performance potential back. This is not significant for many use cases because the USB interface is already restrictive in random performance for heavier workloads.

The 20 Gbps interface is, however, a bonus for traditional sequential workloads such as media file transfers and backups. The tighter and more rugged design of the Rocket nano V2, in contrast to the EX100U, translates to a more reliable experience on the whole, particularly with sustained writes. Direct competitors such as the updated Corsair X6 are stuck with QLC and usually a 10 Gbps interface. The Samsung T7 Shield is also limited to 10 Gbps but is otherwise an excellent portable drive, but it’s also bulkier. The nano V2 is appealing if you need 20 Gbps for burst transfers, high portability with some ruggedness, and a minimum level of sustained write performance.

Specifications of Sabrent Rocket nano V2 

The Sabrent Rocket nano V2 is available at 1TB, 2TB, and 4TB. Launch pricing for these capacities is $119.99, $199.99, and $499.99, respectively. This makes the 2TB model the best value, although pricing may change. It is, of course, still far cheaper than the recently-reviewed SanDisk Pro-G40, but a bit more expensive than the updated Crucial X6. It’s very similar to the Corsair EX100U in design and pricing.

The Rocket nano V2 has a 20 Gbps USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 interface and reaches up to 1600/1500 MBps for sequential read and write. Random performance is seldom stipulated for external drives due to interface limitations.

The drive has a 3-year warranty with registration which is not atypical in the industry, although we prefer 5-year for premium products. The drive is very small and lightweight coming in at 2.85 x 1.28 x 0.57 inches and 1.57 ounces, although without the outer silicone shell it’s a bit smaller and lighter. This outer covering does offer better protection against drops.

Software and Accessories of Sabrent Rocket nano V2

The Rocket nano V2 comes with Type-C to Type-A and Type-C to Type-C USB cables. This means it can work on a wider range of devices without you having to buy a separate cable.

As of the time of review, the drive was not supported in Sabrent’s SSD toolbox application, but it may be added later. Sabrent generally offers an OEM version of Acronis True Image Home for its SSDs but this drive is not supported yet. We recommend Macrium Reflect Free for imaging and cloning needs.

A Closer Look at Sabrent Rocket nano V2

The Sabrent Rocket nano V2 is a simple, small portable SSD. The overall design is muted but pleasant. An optional silicone shroud offers additional protection. It has a single USB-C port that is not waterproof, in a departure from the EX100U’s annoying solution. It should be pointed out that this is a very lightweight drive which makes its high capacity options quite attractive, considering it manages them without using QLC.

This is an embedded, or hybrid, design, which means that there’s no bridge controller. The Phison U18 is a native UFD controller which makes this closer to a USB drive in many respects. This can reduce cost, complexity, and physical size. It also usually means lower power draw with higher efficiency. It also means that the storage portion cannot be shucked. There are four NAND packages to go along with the controller, two per side.

The Phison U18 controller is only 2-channel with up to 8 chip enable for each channel, which to us suggests it’s best with 8 dies but can manage 16 just fine. Given the capacity range of the Rocket nano V2 it’s possible to use both 512Gb and 1Tb dies, the latter to reach 4TB. This somewhat limits what flash can be used as some TLC is only available at 512Gb and most QLC only at 1Tb.

This gives us a hint about what the Corsair EX100U is using - Corsair would only state 3D TLC - but Sabrent is more explicit about it. To be direct, we would be looking at either Kioxia’s 112-layer BiCS5 TLC or SK hynix’s 128-layer V6 TLC.

This looks like SK hynix’s 128-layer V6 TLC. This is very good flash, famously used in the SK hynix Gold P31, an extremely popular drive. That particular SSD stood out for its excellent power efficiency but its performance was also class-leading. As with the EX100U we see TI DDR4000 ICs which we believe help maintain a high bus speed with this much flash on a 2-channel controller. The EX100U we reviewed appears to have had the same flash but Corsair left open the door to changing it if necessary.

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Comparison Products

The 2TB Sabrent Rocket nano V2 is up against the SanDisk Extreme Pro v2, the Corsair EX100U, the Kingston XS2000, the Samsung T7 Shield, the SanDisk Pro-G40, the Lexar SL660 Blaze, and the Adata SE900G. The XS2000 and SL660 Blaze are being tested at 1TB.

Trace Testing - 3DMark Storage Benchmark

3DMark’s Storage Benchmark focuses on real-world gaming performance. Each round in this benchmark stresses storage based on gaming activities including loading games, saving progress, installing game files, and recording gameplay video streams.

The Rocket nano V2 is near the bottom in 3DMark, although it does edge out the EX100U. Portable storage is not ideal for high-end gaming, although at this time there is very little difference between any two SSDs when it comes to game load times. This drive would be fine if you wanted to run some games off of it.

Trace Testing – PCMark 10 Storage Benchmark

PCMark 10 is a trace-based benchmark that uses a wide-ranging set of real-world traces from popular applications and everyday tasks to measure the performance of storage devices.

PCMark 10 performance tends to follow 3DMark, and that is the case here with the nano V2 again falling behind. The UFD controller operates like a flash drive which can have negative consequences for some performance measurements. This drive is not ideal for heavier application workloads.

Transfer Rates – DiskBench

We use the DiskBench storage benchmarking tool to test file transfer performance with a custom, 50GB dataset. We copy 31,227 files of various types, such as pictures, PDFs, and videos to a new folder and then follow-up with a reading test of a newly-written 6.5GB zip file.

Performance is a bit better in DiskBench, but the USB interface in general is restrictive for all the drives tested except for the Thunderbolt-capable Professional Pro-G40.

Synthetic Testing - ATTO / CrystalDiskMark

ATTO and CrystalDiskMark (CDM) are free and easy-to-use storage benchmarking tools that SSD vendors commonly use to assign performance specifications to their products. Both of these tools give us insight into how each device handles different file sizes.

ATTO write results are good but read results could be better for the Rocket nano V2. There’s a notable dip at 1MB although performance is acceptable on the whole. CDM sequential performance is also merely fair, with most of the 20 Gbps drives falling within a general range. The 10 Gbps T7 Shield notably falls behind while the TB3 Professional Pro-G40 leads the pack.

Where the nano V2 shines is with random performance in CDM, specifically low queue depth 4KB. The omission of a bridge chip may have helped a bit here, although the flash being used is also quite good. That would explain the XS2000’s relatively poor results in comparison. 4KB performance is an important marker for subjective feel.

Sustained Write Performance, Cache Recovery and Temperature

Official write specifications are only part of the performance picture. Most SSDs implement a write cache, which is a fast area of (usually) pseudo-SLC programmed flash that absorbs incoming data.  Sustained write speeds can suffer tremendously once the workload spills outside of the cache and into the "native" TLC or QLC flash. We use Iometer to hammer the SSD with sequential writes for 15 minutes to measure both the size of the write cache and performance after the cache is saturated. We also monitor cache recovery via multiple idle rounds.

Temperatures are gauged at both idle and load states via sensor and an infrared thermometer. The typical ambient temperature is at 24C. The load state involves sustained writes at maximum speed with measurement ensuing if and until throttling is demonstrated to discover the equilibrium temperature.

The 2TB Rocket nano V2 writes in pSLC mode at almost 1.57GBps for just over 15 seconds with a cache of 24GB. This is a small, dynamic cache, best used to absorb random writes. Recovery in general will be a bit slower. For larger writes, especially sequential ones, sustained performance in TLC mode is at over 800MBps. This is an excellent result for a drive like this and means it can be used for applications where a certain level of consistent performance is desirable, such as with transferring footage.

This is also where the Rocket nano V2 pulls away from the very similar EX100U. Our sustained write test involves the use of active cooling to avoid throttling. The EX100U still throttled while the Rocket nano V2 did not. The Rocket nano V2’s aluminum casing and thermal interface help keep it cool, an important consideration especially in warmer environments. That casing is also more protective in general.

We wanted to get a feel for how this drive handled a sustained load in comparison to the EX100U, a drive that easily throttled, with no active cooling. With sustained writes, the maximum temperature reached by SMART was 75C with the metal part - inside the silicone outer case - reaching 54C. The Rocket nano V2 did not throttle.

Test Bench and Testing Notes

We use an Alder Lake platform with most background applications such as indexing, windows updates, and anti-virus disabled in the OS to reduce run-to-run variability. Each SSD is prefilled to 50% capacity and tested as a secondary device. Unless noted, we use active cooling for all SSDs. Portable SSDs are tested with write caching explicitly enabled for the device within Windows.

Conclusion

The Sabrent Rocket nano V2 is a capable but unexciting portable SSD. Performance is generally weak but it does well with 4KB and sustained writes, two crucial areas for storage of this type; portable drives are often used to transfer files, particularly larger files, with occasional reading of backup data. The Rocket nano V2 is also quite small and lightweight which makes it easy to carry around, it comes with both types of USB cables you might need, and the metal exterior adds protection and helps keep the drive cool. It checks all the boxes for effective portable storage.

The Rocket nano V2 additionally has an optional silicone case which can add some drop resistance, but the drive lacks an IP rating and the USB port is not waterproof. Coupled with just a 3-year maximum warranty, this reinforces the drive as being budget-oriented. The good news is that it’s available up to 4TB and comes with excellent TLC, factors that help set it apart from some of the competition. The 20 Gbps interface is also nice but of secondary importance.

We are giving this drive the same score as the EX100U despite the fact that the Rocket nano V2 is the better drive. The nano V2 does not have the same throttling issues of the EX100U and the overall design also feels superior, almost like a premium product. However, we cannot score it higher because the performance just isn’t there. That is the trade-off for getting such a small drive, keeping in mind that this is also a very efficient design that won’t completely drain your laptop battery. It really comes down to picking the drive that suits your needs at the right price point, and the Rocket nano V2 is a fair option to have.

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The Corsair EX100U is an unexceptional portable SSD that manages to pack up to 4TB with a 20 Gbps interface in a small package. It does this using TLC rather than QLC flash, which is preferred, but performance as a whole is inconsistent. The warranty is a bit on the weak side but Corsair does back it up with software and includes both popular types of USB-C cables. Pricing is not particularly competitive but this is a competent middle-of-the-road portable SSD - if you’re not looking for anything fancy.

Portable SSDs tend towards the cheaper end, for example at 10 Gbps with QLC, or at the more expensive professional end, with Thunderbolt speeds and performant TLC. Examples of both would be the Inland Platinum External and SanDisk Professional G-Drive (previously G-Technology G-Drive), respectively. It’s possible to get good sustained performance at 10 Gbps, such as with the Samsung T7 Shield, but affordable 20 Gbps options are a bit more limited, particularly if you need 4TB.

The EX100U suffers a bit from an identity crisis with contradictory characteristics, for example having not-horrible sequential write performance but combining it with a cheap design. It’s clearly budget-oriented with its 2-channel controller and lackluster all-around performance yet it comes with TLC, high-capacity options, and a 20 Gbps interface. It’s not aimed at being a professional drive with its weaker warranty and physical build despite having this faster interface. Not on par with the best external SSDs, Corsair's drive is best defined as a compromise or impulse buy if you need a general portable SSD.

Specifications

The Corsair EX100U is rated up to 1,600/1,500 MBps for sequential read and write, respectively, at all capacities. It’s offered at 1TB, 2TB, and 4TB. It utilizes a USB-C interface for up to USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 speeds, or 20 Gbps. The drive itself is small at 79.37 x 36.5 x 11mm, weighing it at just 22 grams. Corsair backs it with a 3-year warranty and 250TB of writes per TB of capacity.

At the time of review, the drive was available on Amazon and Corsair’s website for as little as $102.99, $189.99, and $464.99, from smallest to largest capacity. The 1TB and 2TB models are the best values to be had, but are more expensive than competitors like the Crucial X6 and Inland Platinum External. It’s also more expensive than the Samsung T7 Shield, which is more rugged and professional. The EX100U has the advantage of a faster interface than all three, and faster flash than the first two QLC-based drives.

Software and Accessories of Corsair EX100U

The drive comes with two short USB cables, USB Type-C to Type-A and to Type-C. This allows it to be used on most devices. Corsair also offers a download of its Corsair SSD Toolbox, available on Corsair’s website. This software allows you to check the health of the drive and update firmware if required.

A Closer Look at Corsair EX100U

The Corsair EX100U is diminutive which is beneficial for those that desire maximum portability. It’s also quite lightweight, and as a solid state device it has some resistance to shock and vibration. The USB-C port is hidden behind a rubber cover which when closed will offer some protection from dust and water. The drive is rated to pull up to 4W of power, as shown on the back label.

The cap design is, in our opinion, poor. It’s not intuitive to open and you have to be careful when opening it. It’s not particularly rugged, which is an important point because there must be a good seal in order for it to protect the port from liquids, unlike with better designs.

The drive does not have a lot of protection and also no thermal padding. It’s a single PCB with an embedded USB-C connector. On-board we see four NAND packages, the controller, and two additional integrated circuits (ICs) that stand out.

The controller is the Phison U18, the faster sibling of the U17 that we saw in the updated Crucial X6 and the Inland Platinum External. These two controllers are very similar, but the U18 is 20 Gbps with its USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 interface while the U17 is at 10 Gbps with USB 3.2 Gen 2x1. As the controllers are only 2-channel, the bus speed is necessarily increased from 800 to 1400 MT/s. These controllers are a hybrid design in the sense that they replace the need for an external bridge chip. This can have ramifications for performance and power consumption. It also simplifies the design and saves on cost.

We can also see two Texas Instruments TS3DDR4000 ICs between the controller and the NAND. These DDR switches have multiple applications, for example being able to commit data to non-volatile media from DRAM during a power loss event. This controller is DRAM-less but, of course, current ONFi flash is based on NV-DDR3 I/O. These ICs allow for high speed switching for 1:2 so likely assist the 2-channel controller with the use of four NAND packages. Only the 2TB and 4TB models have four while the 1TB has two, so the latter may not have these chips.

The Phison U18 is a native universal flash drive (UFD) controller which suggests it is designed for USB applications. The 2-channel design reinforces this assumption. As such, the 1400 MT/s bus required to hit USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 speeds may be a bit taxing for a full-on SSD solution. This may be why these ICs are on-board for higher capacities, especially as a USB flash drive will typically not have this many NAND packages. The TS3DDR4000 data sheet explicitly states, for one application, that “to meet the performance requirement of an SSD, the ability to isolate the loading becomes necessary.”

I was not able to get information or confirmation on this from either Corsair or Phison.

The flash is labeled HA7HG64AWA which appears to be 176-layer Micron TLC. Corsair would not confirm this when I asked, possibly to reserve the ability to swap out of the flash at a later date. Corsair lists the drive as having “3D NAND” officially. Given that this drive is available up to 4TB, BiCS5 TLC is another possibility. We did not see any samples of this hardware with QLC at this time.

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Comparison Products

For portable SSD testing, write caching is enabled on all drives. This is as recommended by Corsair. The 2TB Corsair EX100U is up against three other drives at its capacity including the Samsung T7, the Adata SE900G, the SanDisk Pro G-Drive (formerly G-Technology G-Drive), and the SanDisk Extreme Pro v2. 1TB competitors include the Lexar SL660 Blaze, the Kingston XS2000, and the WD My Passport SSD. Portable drives are often limited in speed by the USB interface and also often use 4-channel controllers, so comparing 1TB drives is fair game.

Trace Testing - 3DMark Storage Benchmark

3DMark’s Storage Benchmark focuses on real-world gaming performance. Each round in this benchmark stresses storage based on gaming activities including loading games, saving progress, installing game files, and recording gameplay video streams.

The EX100U comes in dead last for the 3DMark benchmark. This is one reason we wanted to confirm the flash with Corsair as initial thinking was that the EX100U could be using QLC. It instead seems to be a consequence of using a 2-channel UFD controller.

Trace Testing – PCMark 10 Storage Benchmark

PCMark 10 is a trace-based benchmark that uses a wide-ranging set of real-world traces from popular applications and everyday tasks to measure the performance of storage devices.

The EX100U also finishes last in PCMark 10. This makes it difficult to recommend it for enthusiasts, but synthetic benchmarks are not everything, especially when it comes to portable SSDs.

Transfer Rates – DiskBench

We use the DiskBench storage benchmarking tool to test file transfer performance with a custom, 50GB dataset. We copy 31,227 files of various types, such as pictures, PDFs, and videos to a new folder and then follow-up with a reading test of a newly-written 6.5GB zip file.

[Charts]

The EX100U is mediocre in DiskBench, its performance bolstered by its 20 Gbps interface. It is able to match or beat some of the 10 Gbps drives in this test.

Synthetic Testing - ATTO / CrystalDiskMark

ATTO and CrystalDiskMark (CDM) are free and easy-to-use storage benchmarking tools that SSD vendors commonly use to assign performance specifications to their products. Both of these tools give us insight into how each device handles different file sizes.

EX100U sequential performance is also reasonable in ATTO and CDM. There’s a dip with the 1MB block size in ATTO which may reveal some characteristics or quirks of the underlying hardware. The EX100U also shows some solid numbers for random 4K performance, suggesting that this flash is TLC. CDM results as a whole paint a better picture for the drive.

Sustained Write Performance, Cache Recovery, and Temperature

Official write specifications are only part of the performance picture. Most SSDs implement a write cache, which is a fast area of (usually) pseudo-SLC programmed flash that absorbs incoming data.  Sustained write speeds can suffer tremendously once the workload spills outside of the cache and into the "native" TLC or QLC flash. We use Iometer to hammer the SSD with sequential writes for 15 minutes to measure both the size of the write cache and performance after the cache is saturated. We also monitor cache recovery via multiple idle rounds.

Temperatures are gauged at both idle and load states via sensor and an infrared thermometer. The typical ambient temperature is at 24C. The load state involves sustained writes at maximum speed with measurement ensuing if and until throttling is demonstrated to discover the equilibrium temperature.

The 2TB Corsair EX100U writes in pSLC mode at around 1.58 GBps for a bit over 15 seconds. The cache in this case is about 24GB, which matches the typical size for SSDs based on Phison’s E12 controller. However, Corsair lists this cache as static while those drives had a dynamic cache. This implies that the EX100U’s cache size will vary directly with total drive capacity, for example being perhaps half this size on the 1TB model. Static pSLC tends to be associated with higher sustained writes and can improve both endurance and drive consistency. It also tends to recover fluidly as it does not have to cycle through available TLC.

This seems to be the case as the EX100U manages up to 850 MBps after the cache is exhausted for a prolonged period of time. The drive does then drop down to about 330 MBps before rebounding to 610 MBps or so. While not particularly amazing, the EX100U almost keeps up with drives like the My Passport SSD and SanDisk Professional G-Drive, which is remarkable given that the EX100U is using a 2-channel controller. This suggests that Corsair intentionally used TLC and static pSLC to ensure relatively good sequential write performance.

This drive is not ideal for a content creator who needs very specific, consistent performance with sustained writes, but on the other hand it is superior to many other drives like the SL660 Blaze. It’s also cheaper than the SanDisk Pro-G40 but costs a bit more than the Samsung T7 Shield. The EX100U is positioned to offer capacity, relatively good write performance, portability, and 20 Gbps speeds in the middle of the market, offering a compromise that manages to avoid QLC.

We expected this drive to get toasty due to the overall construction and we were not surprised. The EX100U idled at 48C, a bit on the high side, then hit 80C+ with sustained writes. At that point write speeds began to fluctuate widely, suggesting a thermal throttling limit. Our assumption that this would not meet the criteria for professional use - where you may want consistent write speeds - is proven valid. However, it should be fine for general transfers.

Test Bench and Testing Notes

We use an Alder Lake platform with most background applications such as indexing, windows updates, and anti-virus disabled in the OS to reduce run-to-run variability. Each SSD is prefilled to 50% capacity and tested as a secondary device. Unless noted, we use active cooling for all SSDs. Portable SSDs are tested with write caching explicitly enabled for the device within Windows.

Conclusion

The Corsair EX100U is a pretty basic portable SSD, having strengths and weaknesses without any real coherent design. It’s small with good capacity options and has sufficient performance for everyday portable drive needs. Its price is a bit higher for its 20 Gbps interface and TLC flash, but its build and overall performance fall short of what a professional would need. This puts it somewhere in the middle of the options currently available on the market. Corsair is at least a known brand, which fends off cheap imitators.

We would recommend this as a compromise purchase, for example if you want 20 Gbps burst performance with enough sustained performance to handle larger transfers. The ability to get up to 4TB is nice, too, especially given the small and light design. We would not suggest it for use in less amenable environments or when maximum performance is required. It’s a sufficient portable SSD for most needs without any stand-out features.

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Update 28th November 2022: We've updated this article with new testing for the 2TB SanDisk Pro-G40 SSD on page 2.

Original Review published 17th November 2022:

The SanDisk Pro-G40 is a resilient and fast portable SSD with a USB-C interface for both Thunderbolt 3 and USB 3.2 Gen 2 transfer modes. This gives it some flexibility, as it will work with a large number of devices with a high maximum speed. The metal core is surrounded by a silicon bumper edge to protect the drive from drops and other accidents while also keeping the internal M.2 SSD cool. The USB-C port is reinforced with metal for added protection, and SanDisk specs the full SSD with an IP68 water resistance rating. The drive comes with a Type-C to Type-C cable, an ample warranty, and solid support.

This drive is priced for professionals, and the combination of sustained performance and toughness is something we last recommended in the Samsung T7 Shield. The SSD technology in the Pro-G40 is a little bit older, but it has the advantage of DRAM and a Thunderbolt mode over the T7 Shield. Western Digital’s PCIe 3.0 drives, like the Red SN700, are known for their superb sustained write performance and overall consistency. This is also true of the Pro-G40, making it unrivaled if you need to transfer data quickly in the field.

Specifications

The SanDisk Pro-G40 is rated for up to 2,700/1,900 MBps for sequential reads and writes, respectively, in Thunderbolt 3 mode. It has a separate rating of up to 1,050/1,000 MBps in USB mode. The former is using a 40 Gbps connection, with the latter being 10 Gbps. This is valid for both available capacities.

The unit is fairly portable, weighing in around 120 grams with a 4.36 x 2.28 x 0.47 inch footprint. It’s also designed to be a bit rugged with an IP68 rating, meaning it is dust- and water-resistant. SanDisk also states it can survive a three meter fall with up to 4000 pounds of crush resistance. The company backs this up with a 5-year warranty.

Software and Accessories

The SanDisk Pro-G40 comes with a relatively short 20cm (or about 8”) USB Type-C to Type-C cable. Western Digital has a variety of downloads available for its drives, and SanDisk also provides its own SSD Dashboard software. This should cover any basic needs.

A Closer Look

The SanDisk Pro-G40 is a pleasant drive to behold. The aluminum core is rugged and also helps with heat dissipation. The USB-C port is reinforced with metal for added durability. The drive is also protected from drops with its rubberized edges. The design is simple but effective.

We do not recommend opening the casing as it does require some finesse. The case has ample thermal padding to ensure efficient heat transfer. Inside we see the PCB with the SSD, the Thunderbolt controller, the bridge chip, and a USB-C port.

The drive is in the standard M.2 2280 form factor with a controller, two NAND packages, and DRAM. The Thunderbolt 3 controller is a Titan Ridge JHL7440 and the USB bridge chip is the 10 Gbps ASMedia ASM2362. This bridge is commonly used in retail portable SSDs. As the drive has DRAM there is no need to worry about the slower Host Memory Buffer tech we see in slower devices, although this would be passed over Thunderbolt 3 (TB3).

This controller is familiar as it’s the same one we saw on the WD Red SN700 and is also present on the WD Black SN730s used with the WD Black AN1500. Older, but reliable. The drive itself is the SN750E, much as the SN550E is in other WD/SanDisk portables. There’s been reports that these external-only controller revisions have reduced sustained performance when shucked and used as a standard drive in a PC. It doesn’t make much sense to shuck this drive, though.

1GB of SK hynix DDR4 is matched with 1TB of 96-layer BiCS4 TLC, the latter arranged in two 512GB packages. This makes this drive closer to the Red SN700 or Black SN730 than the Black SN750. This has the potential to be extremely consistent with sustained writes which should enable it to match or exceed the Samsung T7 Shield. This is older hardware: 112-layer BiCS5 TLC is becoming more commonplace, as in the WD Black SN770, however it is more than ample for portable use.

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SanDisk Pro-G40 SSD 2TB

Comparison Products

The 2TB SanDisk Pro-G40 was tested in both the Thunderbolt and USB modes. It’s up against the Samsung T7 Shield, the Samsung X5, the LaCie Rugged SSD Pro, the SanDisk G-Drive Pro (previously G-Technology G-Drive), the Sabrent Rocket XTRM-Q, and the SanDisk Extreme Pro v2. Only the final two are also at 2TB; the rest were tested at 1TB. In most cases, 1TB of TLC should be sufficient to reach high performance with a portable drive.

Trace Testing - 3DMark Storage Benchmark

Built for gamers, 3DMark’s Storage Benchmark focuses on real-world gaming performance. Each round in this benchmark stresses storage based on gaming activities including loading games, saving progress, installing game files, and recording gameplay video streams.

The 2TB SanDisk Pro-G40 is the top performer in this test in Thunderbolt mode. It even beats the Samsung T7 Shield in USB mode, so this drive is perfectly adequate for gaming.

Trace Testing – PCMark 10 Storage Benchmark

PCMark 10 is a trace-based benchmark that uses a wide-ranging set of real-world traces from popular applications and everyday tasks to measure the performance of storage devices.

The Pro-G40 is a bit weaker in PCMark, but still puts up good numbers in both modes. It also beats Samsung’s portable drives, which is certainly a checkmark in its favor.

Transfer Rates – DiskBench

We use the DiskBench storage benchmarking tool to test file transfer performance with a custom, 50GB dataset. We copy 31,227 files of various types, such as pictures, PDFs, and videos to a new folder and then follow up with a reading test of a newly-written 6.5GB zip file.

The Pro-G40 is best-in-class in DiskBench, although the Thunderbolt-capable drives are all pretty close. In USB mode, it also edges out the T7 Shield. This drive is simply excellent for file transfers.

Synthetic Testing - ATTO / CrystalDiskMark

ATTO and CrystalDiskMark (CDM) are free and easy-to-use storage benchmarking tools that SSD vendors commonly use to assign performance specifications to their products. Both of these tools give us insight into how each device handles different file sizes.

We also see excellent sequential performance, as we did with the 1TB model. The performance in 4K random work is also reasonably good. Once again, the Pro-G40 beats the T7 Shield in USB mode. There are limits for these interfaces, but the Pro-G40’s hardware is ample to get the most out of them.

Sustained Write Performance, Cache Recovery, and Temperature

Official write specifications are only part of the performance picture. Most SSDs implement a write cache, which is a fast area of (usually) pseudo-SLC programmed flash that absorbs incoming data.  Sustained write speeds can suffer tremendously once the workload spills outside of the cache and into the "native" TLC or QLC flash. We use Iometer to hammer the SSD with sequential writes for 15 minutes to measure both the size of the write cache and performance after the cache is saturated. We also monitor cache recovery via multiple idle rounds.

Temperatures are gauged at both idle and load states via sensor and an infrared thermometer. The typical ambient temperature is at 24C. The load state involves sustained writes at maximum speed with measurement ensuing if and until throttling is demonstrated to discover the equilibrium temperature.

As with the 1TB, the 2TB Pro-G40 has excellent sustained write performance. The larger capacity means the pSLC cache can be larger, theoretically twice the capacity, but it’s still static. This larger capacity is still an improvement — particularly for smaller batches of writes. The cache can also still recover quickly.

TLC performance is about the same, although this is to be expected; it’s likely that the flash is twice as dense and therefore has the same amount of dies. Larger dies within the same generation may be a bit slower, for example with low queue depth 4K random read latency, but in practice this difference is small. The 2TB model is cheaper per GB, so is therefore ideal if you need the capacity, but it doesn’t bring better performance.

The drive performs very close to the SanDisk Extreme Pro v2, which is to be expected as the hardware is the same. Even the 20 Gbps ASMedia ASM2364 bridge chip on the Extreme Pro v2 is fast enough for the TLC flash. However, the Pro-G40 is more rugged and there are performance advantages to Thunderbolt versus USB, as demonstrated in other benchmarks above. The Pro-G40 is particularly attractive if you need the full package.

Unsurprisingly, the 2TB drive had the same thermal characteristics of the 1TB. It idled at 45C and hit a maximum temperature of 61C. This is a cool-running drive at any capacity.

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SanDisk Pro-G40 SSD 1TB

RATING: ★★★★ ½ (4.5 Stars)

PROS

+ Excellent all-around performance
+ Class-leading sustained write performance
+ Rugged, aesthetically-pleasing design

CONS

- Price

OUR VERDICT
The 1TB SanDisk Pro-G40 is the best portable SSD we’ve tested, getting strong marks in every performance category. It’s fast and rugged. If you can take advantage of the Thunderbolt capability and overlook the price, it’s hard to beat.

Comparison Products

We are testing the 1TB SanDisk Pro-G40 in both TB3 and USB modes. It’s up against the Samsung T7 Shield, the WD Black P50, the Samsung X5, the Kingston XS2000, the LaCie Rugged SSD Pro, and the SanDisk G-Drive Pro (previously G-Technology G-Drive).

Trace Testing - 3DMark Storage Benchmark

3DMark’s Storage Benchmark focuses on real-world gaming performance. Each round in this benchmark stresses storage based on gaming activities including loading games, saving progress, installing game files, and recording gameplay video streams.

The Pro-G40 takes the crown in 3DMark when run in TB3 mode, but performance in USB mode is less impressive. Still, you should be buying this drive for its Thunderbolt functionality, with USB fallback being a bonus. In any case, this drive is serviceable for gaming.

Trace Testing – PCMark 10 Storage Benchmark

PCMark 10 is a trace-based benchmark that uses a wide-ranging set of real-world traces from popular applications and everyday tasks to measure the performance of storage devices.

The Pro-G40 scores well in both modes in PCMark 10. It falls behind the LaCie which uses the same Thunderbolt controller and similar flash, but a different SSD controller. This might just be a quirk of the test. The Pro-G40’s latency is better in Thunderbolt mode, as expected, which is nice.

Transfer Rates – DiskBench

We use the DiskBench storage benchmarking tool to test file transfer performance with a custom, 50GB dataset. We copy 31,227 files of various types, such as pictures, PDFs, and videos to a new folder and then follow-up with a reading test of a newly-written 6.5GB zip file.

DiskBench is bandwidth-limited so we expect the Thunderbolt-capable drives to perform better, and they do. The Pro-G40 pushes the limits of what is possible with this interface. It’s not as performant in USB mode, but it manages to beat the Samsung T7 Shield, which is a cheaper competitor for that mode.

Synthetic Testing - ATTO / CrystalDiskMark

ATTO and CrystalDiskMark (CDM) are free and easy-to-use storage benchmarking tools that SSD vendors commonly use to assign performance specifications to their products. Both of these tools give us insight into how each device handles different file sizes.

The Pro-G40 has exceptional sequential performance in Thunderbolt mode, seen both in the ATTO and sequential CDM results. In USB mode it matches or beats the T7 Shield. The 4K low queue depth and latency performance happen to be limited by the interface for respective drives, but the Pro-G40 is still among the best.

Sustained Write Performance, Cache Recovery, & Temperature

Official write specifications are only part of the performance picture. Most SSDs implement a write cache, which is a fast area of (usually) pseudo-SLC programmed flash that absorbs incoming data.  Sustained write speeds can suffer tremendously once the workload spills outside of the cache and into the "native" TLC or QLC flash. We use Iometer to hammer the SSD with sequential writes for 15 minutes to measure both the size of the write cache and performance after the cache is saturated. We also monitor cache recovery via multiple idle rounds.

Temperatures are gauged at both idle and load states via sensor and an infrared thermometer. The typical ambient temperature is at 24C. The load state involves sustained writes at maximum speed with measurement ensuing if and until throttling is demonstrated to discover the equilibrium temperature.

The 1TB SanDisk Pro-G40 does not disappoint during the sustained write benchmarks. It has a small pSLC cache, as also found on the Red SN700 and Black SN750, followed by consistently high TLC performance. The pSLC cache on this drive is static, which can improve endurance and performance consistency. For example, by caching smaller random writes and demonstrating stronger full-drive performance, respectively. This cache can recover quickly to absorb random writes, if necessary.

This also means this drive can out-write anything on the market when in Thunderbolt mode. Even in USB mode it beats the T7 Shield, a drive specifically designed for sustained performance. The Pro-G40 would be excellent for professionals who do a lot of file transfers and need guaranteed performance, particularly in less salubrious environments.

The drive idled at 45C and only hit 60C after a full drive of writes. While the design may be insulative when idle, good thermal contact with a metal case helps the drive stay far away from any throttling state. The case itself remained below 50C and safe to touch.

Test Bench and Testing Notes

We use an Alder Lake platform with most background applications such as indexing, windows updates, and anti-virus disabled in the OS to reduce run-to-run variability. Each SSD is prefilled to 50% capacity and tested as a secondary device. Unless noted, we use active cooling for all SSDs. Portable SSDs are tested with write caching explicitly enabled for the device within Windows.

Conclusion

The SanDisk Pro-G40 is a truly exceptional portable SSD that checks all the right boxes. Its performance is excellent in almost every test and its ability to sustain high write speeds puts it a cut above drives like the Samsung T7 Shield. It is also rugged without looking ridiculous or taking up a lot of space. 

The metal core and reinforced port help make it dust- and water-resistant, but the tight thermal interface also helps the drive dissipate heat under sustained loads. The ability to operate in both Thunderbolt and USB modes also makes it more flexible or faster than drives that only use one or the other.

There is some room for improvement, though. It’s possible to get 20 Gbps out of USB, as with the WD Black P50, although this implementation is usually disregarded in order to jump up to Thunderbolt 3 or newer technology. SanDisk could have also offered a longer cable or a separate Type-C to Type-A cable to improve compatibility, but a small, single cable enhances portability. The Pro-G40 could also have instituted newer hardware for the internal drive, but this would not have appreciably improved its performance. With all these design considerations in mind, the only real drawback to this SSD is its price.

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Rugged adventurous types who like to take their SSDs hiking, hunting or cave diving have a new storage solution to appeal to their outdoorsy tastes, as Western Digital has announced the latest release from its Sandisk subsidiary: the Pro-G40 with Thunderbolt 3.

With an IP68 rating (dust-tight and able to be submerged in water) the Pro-G40 can also withstand a remarkable 4,000lbs of crush weight (that’s equivalent to a white rhino, or a Ford Taurus) and can withstand a drop of three meters (9.8ft) onto a carpeted concrete floor. While there's little detail in the announcement about what it’s made of, apart from being ‘pro-grade’ and ‘ultra-rugged’ with ‘premium strength’, we do know it has an aluminum core that acts as a heat-sink to help maintain high speeds. 

The combination of the SSD and Thunderbolt 3 (40Gb/s) / USB 3.2 Gen 2 (10Gb/s) Type-C interface gives the drive a high transfer rate of up to 2700MB/s read and 1900MB/s write, capable of transferring 50GB in 30 seconds, which will please filmmakers looking for a speedy backup solution to use in the field. Even better, that kind of speed allows real-time 4K/8K editing straight from the drive. There's no mention of it in the announcement, but it’s almost certainly bus-powered too, given that there are no other ports on the drive.

Western Digital has also identified a problem with USB Type-C cables all being identical on the outside, but not on the inside, and has thoughtfully included a cable with the drive that supports both interfaces. “The new PRO-G40 SSD eliminates the problem we have all experienced before: grabbing the wrong USB-C cable or computer for our Thunderbolt 3 or USB devices,” said Hector Sandoval, vice president of product marketing, pricing and programs at Western Digital. “By supporting both interfaces and including a cable that does as well, this drive enables creatives to efficiently collaborate across devices without having to worry about carrying the right gear nor diminishing sustained performance as they continue producing impactful content.”

The Sandisk Professional Pro-G40 is available in 1TB and 2TB capacities, comes only in black, and should be available on the Western Digital store by the time you read this. MSRP is around $480 (£415 in the UK), presumably for the 1TB version. If you're in the US, you can check our curated list of current Western Digital coupon codes for possible savings. 

The new Crucial X6 is an affordable external USB-C SSD designed for big capacity and maximum portability. The drive is well-priced for those who need a significant amount of storage that’s faster and more reliable than what you get with a portable hard drive, making it a contender for our list of best external SSDs, but its rated performance is nothing to write home about and it comes with minimal frills and extras. 

Crucial’s original X6 used a DRAM-less SATA controller with a similar type of flash, but it was limited to 540MBps of sequential read throughput. The newer model, tested at a capacious 4TB, is rated for up to 800MBps. This makes it a good choice for storage on the go or if you want something relatively quick to back up your data. Its performance is definitely limited, though, so while it can survive a fall from height, you should keep your performance expectations in check. Content creators might want to look at something like the Samsung T7 Shield instead.

This drive is lightweight and small in stature, making it easy to throw into your laptop bag or backpack. It's also designed to survive drops and runs fairly cool. However, it doesn’t come with a Type-A cable, which might reduce its appeal.

Specifications

The Crucial X6 is available at 500GB, 1TB, 2TB, and 4TB. The 500GB SKU is still limited to the original peak read throughput of 540MBps; however, the larger models are now rated for up to 800MBps for sequential reads. The drives are drop-resistant up to two meters, or about 6.5 feet. The drive is small and lightweight in every incarnation, specified as less than 1.5 ounces and easy to fit in a pocket. Crucial backs this drive with a three-year warranty.

Pricing is best at 1TB or higher capacities, and that’s where you should look to buy a drive like this anyway. While the cost per gigabyte could be lower, it remains reasonable against its competition. It would be best if you bought this for basic storage extension; the Crucial X6 isn't intended to be a high-end product.

Software and Accessories 

The Crucial X6 comes with a Type-C to Type-C cable, but you can use a Type-C to Type-A cable if you purchase one separately. Crucial's downloadable and free Storage Executive software works with the X6, allowing you to get firmware updates, manage drive functions, and monitor the drive's health. Crucial's Momentum Cache feature offers the ability to dedicate system memory (RAM) to act as a cache for the drive, but we do not recommend this feature due to data integrity concerns in the event of an unexpected disconnection or power loss. 

A Closer Look

The Crucial X6 comes in a relatively small rounded black case, but Crucial claims it can survive a two-meter fall. One side has a USB-C connector to attach the included Type-C to Type-C cable, while the back lists basic information about the drive, like its capacity and the serial number. There's nothing flashy here, but the drive's small size and lightweight nature make it quite portable.

Internally we see EMI shielding, tape, and thermal padding. The latter should allow the drive to stay relatively cool during prolonged use. Beneath all of this is the PCB, which includes a DRAM-less controller and, for the 4TB SKU, two NAND packages on either side (for a total of four).

A closer look at the controller lets us see various power circuitry centered around the Phison PS6103 PMIC. The lack of a bridge chip tells us that this controller is an embedded hybrid design that manages both the interface and flash.

The original Phison PS2251-17 controller was used for USB flash drives with a USB 3.2 Gen 2x1 interface and a Type-A connector. It’s often speed- and capacity-limited when utilized for that application. Phison more recently developed the U17 from this basis, with the same interface but a Type-C connector. The controller is also capable of managing up to 4TB of flash and can reach higher speeds. The U17 is a native UFD controller in the same vein as Silicon Motion’s SM2320, which is used in the Kingston XS2000.

In this case, we have a USB-C connector and speeds up to 800 MBps — less than what the 10 Gbps interface and 1 GBps U17 can handle — coupled with QLC at up to 4TB. This two-channel controller typically manages up to sixteen dies, so this capacity pushes the controller a bit. We previously reviewed the Inland Platinum External SSD, which uses the same controller and QLC flash but is rated for higher speeds and comes only at lower capacities.

The flash modules are labeled NY165. These are 8Tb (1TB) modules, for a total of 4TB. Each of the four modules has eight 1Tb (128GB) QLC dies in an 8DP/ODP configuration. This is a newer QLC flash, specifically Micron’s 176-layer QLC (N48R), based on the same architecture as its 176L TLC (B47R). We suspected this during testing, then later confirmed with Crucial, who stated that the updated drive with the U17 launched with 96-layer QLC but may now come with the newer flash.

This is a departure from the floating gate (FG) QLC that Micron made in partnership with Intel at 64 and 96 layers. Micron previously used the 96L QLC on the original X6, coupled with Silicon Motion’s DRAM-less SM2259XT SATA controller with the 5Gbps ASMedia ASM235CM bridge chip. This newer QLC has appeared on some of Micron’s OEM drives and should be in the P3 and P3 Plus. We'll cover the deeper technical aspects of the flash in the latter’s review.

The SSD market should see more 176-layer or equivalent QLC from multiple manufacturers in the coming months. This is relevant as it suggests that QLC may finally grab a decent market share while being performant enough to replace TLC in many cases. It also means we'll get larger drives with a lower cost per gigabyte, especially as NAND prices continue to plummet. Products like the 4TB X6 will become more common, particularly with new UFD controllers, so use this review as a baseline.

MORE: Best External SSDs and Hard Drives

MORE: How We Test HDDs And SSDs

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Comparison Products

We put the 4TB Crucial X6 against a variety of other portable SSDs, including Crucial’s own X8 and the original X6, both at 2TB. We also included the 2TB Samsung T7 Shield and SanDisk’s Professional G-Drive. The remaining three drives — Kingston’s XS2000, WD’s Black D30, and the Inland Platinum Internal — are 1TB.

These drives use different controllers and approaches to bridge chips. For example, the XS2000 has a hybrid design, so we can see differences in approach. The choice in flash also varies, so we’ll see how much of an impact QLC flash has on performance.

Game Scene Loading - Final Fantasy XIV

Final Fantasy XIV Shadowbringers is a free real-world game benchmark that easily and accurately compares game load times without the inaccuracy of using a stopwatch.

Having 4TB of portable storage could be nice to haul around your games. Unfortunately, the new X6 doesn't do very well in this test. Most likely, it’s still close enough to other SSDs in game loading times that it will be just fine for this type of usage. It’s not a surprise it comes close to the Platinum External as the drives have similar hardware - the U17 controller with QLC flash. The older X6, which had a separate SATA controller and bridge chip paired with QLC flash, is significantly faster.

Other drives with normal controllers also fare well and perform relatively close to each other. The Kingston XS2000, which uses SMI’s UFD design, is a big surprise. However, that drive uses TLC rather than QLC like the new X6.

Trace Testing – PCMark 10 Storage Benchmark

PCMark 10 is a trace-based benchmark that uses a wide-ranging set of real-world traces from popular applications and everyday tasks to measure the performance of storage devices.

The new X6 does better here, beating the old X6 and the Platinum External. The uplift over those two drives may come from Micron’s newer 176-layer QLC. We haven't seen this flash used much yet, but expectations are that it will match or exceed Intel’s 144-layer QLC. That QLC is used in Intel’s 670p, while most other QLC drives on the market use 96-layer QLC from the time of Intel and Micron’s cooperative efforts. For you, this means more consistent performance with the new X6, all else being equal. The extra dies in the 4TB X6, as opposed to the 1TB Platinum External, can also help sustain bandwidth.

We nevertheless see better performance from the rest of the drives, although these have TLC or, as in the X8’s case, a faster controller and interface.

Transfer Rates – DiskBench

We use the DiskBench storage benchmarking tool to test file transfer performance with a custom, 50GB dataset. We copy 31,227 files of various types, such as pictures, PDFs, and videos to a new folder and then follow-up with a reading test of a newly-written 6.5GB zip file.

The new X6 also does better in DiskBench, where its faster interface propels it above the old model. It also beats the WD_Black D30, likely thanks to its large SLC cache. It’s unable to keep up with drives with faster interfaces and higher maximum bandwidth, though. This drive is clearly more about capacity and portability than raw performance.

Synthetic Testing - CrystalDiskMark

CrystalDiskMark (CDM) is a free and easy-to-use storage benchmarking tool that SSD vendors commonly use to assign performance specifications to their products. It gives us insight into how each device handles different file sizes.

In CrystalDiskMark’s sequential tests, the new X6 again does better than the old X6. It has a faster interface than the original design, so that’s not surprising. However, it does remain a bit behind most of the other 10Gbps options, which, while matching Crucial’s 800 MBps specification, has it fall below what the U17 can do, as demonstrated in our Platinum External review.

Performance in random workloads is a bit better, thanks to the use of a hybrid controller. Of course, you will still be constrained by the USB interface and, in some cases, the QLC flash, but these are reasonably good results.

Sustained Write Performance, Cache Recovery, and Temperature

Official write specifications are only part of the performance picture. Most SSDs implement a write cache, which is a fast area of (usually) pseudo-SLC programmed flash that absorbs incoming data.  Sustained write speeds can suffer tremendously once the workload spills outside of the cache and into the "native" TLC or QLC flash. We use Iometer to hammer the SSD with sequential writes for 15 minutes to measure both the size of the write cache and performance after the cache is saturated. We also monitor cache recovery via multiple idle rounds.

The 4TB X6 writes in SLC at a bit more than 800 MBps until its SLC cache is full. As with the 1TB Inland Platinum External, all of the QLC flash can run in this single-bit mode. For a 4TB drive, this comes out to around 1TB — a massive amount. After the drive exhausts the cache, it is forced to copy back incoming data to QLC at a bit below 60 MBps. You don’t want to run out of cache on this drive.

The massive cache allows the drive to out-write the old X6, and, if given enough runway, it does well against every other drive in the list except the T7 Shield. This is not surprising as the T7 Shield was designed for consistent write performance, with fast TLC and a relatively small SLC cache. The X6 is more reasonable for the type of use such a capacious drive would see: bursty file transfers, with more reads than writes. The X6 would work nicely as a backup or archival drive, although SSDs should be plugged in and read at least once a year to ensure data retention.

As with the Platinum External, the X6's cache recovery was relatively quick. This type of design makes sense because the drive is trying to hide its poor QLC performance and needs to free up its “real” capacity as quickly as possible. This could cause issues in some edge cases, particularly with a fuller drive, although this is not a new caveat for DRAM-less QLC SSDs.

The X6 runs relatively cool, idling at 30C as measured by the temperature gun and 40C via SMART. The drive saw no throttling even after writing 1.2TB of data with a surface temperature of 39C and a SMART reading of 53C. Portable drives may have to face hotter environments outdoors, and you also need to be able to handle the drive’s case — therefore, the low drive and surface temperatures are in the X6’s favor.

Test Bench and Testing Notes

We use a Rocket Lake platform with most background applications such as indexing, windows updates, and anti-virus disabled in the OS to reduce run-to-run variability. Each SSD is prefilled to 50% capacity and tested as a secondary device. Unless noted, we use active cooling for all SSDs.

Conclusion

The new Crucial X6 offers greater speed and larger capacities in an extremely portable form factor. The drive is diminutive and basic but designed to survive a two-meter drop. We had no issues with overheating. The drive is also priced right if you need this much capacity. It would work well as an external archival or backup drive and is easy enough to carry around in a pocket to be useful on the go. However, it’s designed to be cheap, which has some significant drawbacks.

The drive’s performance in sequential workloads is lackluster, trailing other 10 Gbps USB drives, including ones like the Inland Platinum External with similar hardware. Drives with a 20 Gbps interface and/or TLC are simply faster and more consistent. Random performance is better than one would expect, thanks to the hybrid controller, which should also be more efficient. However, on the whole, this is not a very performant option and power draw is often a secondary concern.

The X6 only comes with a three-year warranty and lacks a Type-C to Type-A cable out of the box, both of which could be limiting. The optional cable adds to the potential overall cost. Still, the X6 is a better option than an HDD and it’s not from an unknown manufacturer. Crucial/Micron makes its own flash with generally decent quality standards. We would have liked to see more out of this product, though, even if it’s positioned at the low-end.

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Inland's Platinum External SSD looks to put the company's stamp on the portable drive market. This drive from Inland, Micro Center’s in-house SSD brand, is another “P” model, as in Platinum, but it diverges from the company's typical drives by being particularly portable, making it a contender for our list of best external SSDs.

We’ve reviewed plenty of Inland drives over the years, with varying results. The drives do have some common themes, though: no frills, competitive warranty, and cheaper pricing. Inland often uses the same hardware as other manufacturers but offers no software. However, you can pick up their drives in a physical store — if you happen to live near a Micro Center — which can be convenient for many PC builders. This drive is more oriented at laptop or portable users who need a quick, efficient way to transport data, basically serving as a more substantial USB flash drive.

It will be interesting to see how this drive holds up against traditional portable SSDs, like the Samsung T7 Shield, as well as other embedded solutions like the Kingston XS2000.

Inland Platinum External SSD Specifications

The Inland Platinum External SSD comes in 500GB and 1TB capacities. Speeds stretch up to 1.1/1.0 GBps of sequential read/write throughput, matching the 10 Gbps interface. (Micro Center’s site has it the other way around, different than the Amazon listing, but reads are typically faster than writes.)

The Platinum's pricing is actually pretty good compared to other portable 10 Gbps NVMe SSDs. However, the hardware is devised to offer a budget solution, so temper your expectations if you’re looking at this product. It’s likely good for basic storage and decent in read workloads and bursty write workloads, but not much else.

Inland offers a four-year warranty with this drive. The drive is small and bus-powered; the former characteristic is a nice bonus if you really need portability. That’s especially true as Phison has designed the U17 controller to be low-power, making it nice for use with battery-limited laptops.

Software and Accessories

The SSD comes with short USB Type-C to Type-C and Type-C to Type-A cables. This allows the device to be used with pretty much any system under the sun. Obviously, speeds will be reduced with a 5 Gbps host port. As with Inland’s other drives, there are no frills here. Some users might get this drive for archival use or backups, requiring them to grab free software.

A Closer Look

Internally, portable SSDs are normally an entry-level NVMe drive coupled with a USB interface thanks to a separate bridge chip. However, hybrid controllers are becoming more common, like the Phison U17 solution in this device and the SMI SM2320 that we recently examined in the Kingston XS2000. Of course, a 20 Gbps Phison variant — using the faster U18 sibling of this drive’s controller — would be better for comparing sequential performance.

This type of configuration has benefits as the design is streamlined. The drive will pull less power and can be less cumbersome in size, although it can no longer be used internally in a PC. This does mean that a failure will render the entire thing inoperable versus just having to replace a drive or an enclosure. These solutions are, of course, also DRAM-less and may not be as generally performant as traditional drives. Therefore, these designs are specialized, but this is not a new concept as with client BGA SSDs.

The Inland Platinum External’s case is plain, but at least it is easy to open. The LED indicator on top flashes white to show I/O activity. You’re just four screws away from the inside, which unfortunately means there’s no real cooling to be had. We’ll see later if this is an issue. Internally, the 1TB model has two NAND packages — one on either side — plus the DRAM-less Phison U17 controller. The interface is USB-C. As this controller is embedded, meaning there is no separate bridge chip, so the drive is not shuckable.

The Phison U17 controller is a single solution for portable SSDs. Its sibling, the U18, has a faster 20 Gbps interface. Both controllers are 2-channel, but bus speeds are 800 MT/s and 1400 MT/s for the U17 and U18, respectively. We can picture these as similar to SMI’s SM2320, a controller we have reviewed in more than one product. Phison emphasizes that this native UFD controller is far more efficient than having a separate bridge chip. This makes sense since that latter configuration tends to come with a beefier 4-channel controller as well.

Looking at the bus speeds, we can translate 800 MT/s into 800 MB/s per channel, although this will be considerably lower after overhead (addressing, commands, etc.), especially for write traffic. Nevertheless, the two-channel design is sufficient to reach the maximum speeds as limited by the USB interface with 1TB or less of capacity. That also applies to the U18 with its faster bus speed, which additionally allows for higher capacities because the flash will often run at a lower rate. However, sustained performance might be worse for wear on a two-channel design, as we will test.

The flash is labeled IA7HG67AWA, which appears to be 96-layer QLC from Micron. This flash is popular on some drives driven by Phison’s E12S and E16 controllers, and it is also prominent in Intel’s 665p. Intel has since released 144-layer QLC flash with its 670p and, moreover, flash manufacturers are all working on their own 176-layer QLC, including Crucial/Micron which already has products on the market. Clearly, this is a budget-oriented device using older flash.

Micro Center lists this drive as coming with TLC. When asking an Inland representative about the flash, they quickly confirmed my suspicions that it was QLC. This may seem like an egregious mistake particularly as QLC is best at higher capacities. However, this is a two-channel device and QLC is more than adequate at 1TB. It may be a worthwhile trade-off for the tiny size and cheaper per-GB price.

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Comparison Products

We compare the 1TB Inland Platinum External SSD to the Samsung T7 Shield and T7 Touch, the WD Black P50 and My Passport SSD, the Crucial X8, the SanDisk Extreme v2, and the Kingston XS2000. All of these are at 1TB of capacity. We already mentioned that the T7 and XS2000 are interesting drives to compare as they let us see what Phison can do with an integrated controller design.

Game Scene Loading - Final Fantasy XIV

Final Fantasy XIV Shadowbringers is a free real-world game benchmark that easily and accurately compares game load times without the inaccuracy of using a stopwatch.

The Platinum External comes in dead last when it comes to FFXIV loading times. This isn't surprising given the two-channel controller design and QLC flash. The XS2000 with SMI’s four-channel design and TLC flash takes first place. 

Trace Testing – PCMark 10 Storage Benchmark

PCMark 10 is a trace-based benchmark that uses a wide-ranging set of real-world traces from popular applications and everyday tasks to measure the performance of storage devices.

In general, performance is pretty poor here. The Platinum External again lands in last place and can’t even catch the 10 Gbps Samsung T7 drives. This is a limitation of the internal hardware.

Transfer Rates – DiskBench

We use the DiskBench storage benchmarking tool to test file transfer performance with a custom, 50GB dataset. We copy 31,227 files of various types, such as pictures, PDFs, and videos to a new folder and then follow-up with a reading test of a newly-written 6.5GB zip file.

This bandwidth-heavy test essentially measures the sequential interface speed. As such, the Platinum External falls in line with the other 10 Gbps (USB 3.2 Gen 2x1) portable SSDs.

Synthetic Testing - CrystalDiskMark

CrystalDiskMark (CDM) is a free and easy-to-use storage benchmarking tool that SSD vendors commonly use to assign performance specifications to their products. It gives us insight into how each device handles different file sizes.

CrystalDiskMark’s sequential tests perform as expected. Similar to the DiskBench tests above, the interface speed limits the drives. Inland could release a 20 Gbps variant of this drive, if it so desired, to compete with the products using SMI’s SM2320 hybrid controller, albeit with half the channels.

The random I/O results are more interesting, particularly in regard to write performance. While neither the Platinum External nor XS2000 do well with high queue depth random reads, the former performs adequately at queue depth 1. That does tend to be an important metric for general use. Moreover, both drives have strong queue depth 1 random write performance. This is due to a lower base latency as the controllers do not have to go through a separate bridge chip.

Considering these controllers are also more power-efficient, this is of interest to those who may need to copy a lot of small files on the go. Generally, the SLC caches are sufficiently large on these types of drives and can absorb that type of incoming workload without issue.

Sustained Write Performance, Cache Recovery, and Temperature

Official write specifications are only part of the performance picture. Most SSDs implement a write cache, which is a fast area of (usually) pseudo-SLC programmed flash that absorbs incoming data.  Sustained write speeds can suffer tremendously once the workload spills outside of the cache and into the "native" TLC or QLC flash. We use Iometer to hammer the SSD with sequential writes for 15 minutes to measure both the size of the write cache and performance after the cache is saturated. We also monitor cache recovery via multiple idle rounds.

The Inland Platinum writes at around 1.08 GBps for almost 250 seconds, suggesting an SLC cache size of up to 266GB. All of this drive’s native flash is likely being used in pSLC mode - meaning a quarter of the total capacity. After the SLC runs out, the sustained write performance goes as low as 50 MBps or below. This is not unexpected with a 2-channel design utilizing QLC given such a large, dynamic SLC cache. This drive is clearly better designed for reads and bursty write workloads rather than sustained writes.

The Samsung T7 Shield was designed for sustained write performance, clearly shown here. The XS2000, on the other hand, has a faster interface and, therefore, a higher maximum SLC write speed, which is followed by very poor TLC write speeds. These embedded, portable SSD designs naturally have this type of performance. It is a weakness but also a reasonable compromise if the user never sees the edge cases in normal use.

SLC cache recovery was relatively rapid. Phison states that the U17 controller has a built-in thermal sensor with 70C being the upper boundary during operation. After sustained writes, we saw a high temperature of around 66C with the surface hitting 38C, both within reason. This drive could use better cooling, though, perhaps with thermal padding and a more thermally-conductive surface material.

Samsung designed the T7 Shield to remain within specification even in hotter climates, whereas this drive may have more serious concerns in such an environment. That being said, it’s unlikely to be used for sustained writes where the temperature becomes a problem, and once it exceeds the SLC cache, it will be too slow to throttle anyway. Therefore, adding thermal padding is more of an option for DIY users who want extra security.

Test Bench and Testing Notes

We use a Rocket Lake platform with most background applications such as indexing, windows updates, and anti-virus disabled in the OS to reduce run-to-run variability. Each SSD is prefilled to 50% capacity and tested as a secondary device. Unless noted, we use active cooling for all SSDs.

Conclusion

Perhaps it would be better to see this drive as kind of a chunky USB flash drive. In fact, there are flash drive-sized SSDs on the market, including some that use the same controller. Some USB flash drive controllers are also two-channel, of course. The U18 simply offers better peak performance and is paired with better-quality flash than what you find on USB flash drives. That makes this even more of a niche product, but one that can find limited use - perhaps as part of a wider toolbox for on-the-go users.

The first thing we have to mention is errors in this drive’s product listing. The sequential read and write metrics do not seem correct, even if we had no trouble pushing the limits of 10 Gbps for both during testing; they’re listed differently on Micro Center’s site and Amazon. Further, and more seriously, Micro Center lists this drive as coming with TLC flash. This is more common than some users might realize — it’s not uncommon to find drives that say they have TLC or DRAM when the internal hardware varies.

This is disappointing coming from Inland. The representative was quick to confirm our QLC suspicions, and the use of QLC is not generally detrimental given this drive’s intended use. The overall design is, at least, conducive to using QLC at 1TB. This drive is especially small, power-efficient, and cheaper, which makes QLC a fair compromise, although buyers may not be happy about the NAND mixup.

That said, this is a bit of a niche product. It’s perfect for someone who is doing mostly reads with some bursty writes. Or someone who needs something small and efficient. This is particularly true for laptop and mobile users. Videographers will want to step up to the T7 Shield for ruggedness and sustained performance, and those wanting higher performance need a USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 or Thunderbolt portable SSD instead. This drive is minimalist and cannot be shucked, so be aware of what you’re getting with it.

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Lexar’s SL660 Blaze is the company's latest portable drive for gaming and comes in 512GB and 1TB capacities. The drive comes with resplendent RGB lighting and includes software support combined with a selection of materials and styling to sell as a 'gaming' drive that will compete for a spot on our list of best external SSDs. 

The SL660 Blaze reminds us a lot of the Kingston XS2000, they share the same hardware, but it comes with some additional features. It also competes with the ADATA SE900G, which also comes with RGB lighting but has a bulkier package. 

As with the XS2000, SE900G, and other portable drives, convenience is the name of the game. Alternatively, you could purchase your own drive and enclosure independently and save money by combining the two yourself. Of course, SATA-based options of both types also often remain viable, but sometimes it’s nice to have 2GBps of bandwidth at your fingertips.

Let’s see how that works out here.

Specifications

The Lexar SL660 Blaze has just two capacities: 512GB and 1TB. The price per gigabyte at the time of writing, which is for pre-orders, is around $0.20 per gigabyte. This is more pricey than the Kingston XS2000, which has fewer frills while being smaller and weighing less. The SL660 Blaze is rated for up to 2.0/1.9GBps for sequential reads and writes, in line with the XS2000. We would expect these write speeds to dip with extended writes once the SLC cache is exhausted.

As with the XS2000, the SL660 Blaze has a five-year warranty and is rated for shock resistance. In addition, the controller itself has typical data protection with SMI’s NANDXtend, a patented technology that has similarities to techniques used on other controllers. This gets the most endurance out of the flash through LDPC error correction and can correct errors through RAID parity. Lexar also offers 256-bit AES encryption, but this is software-based, so it won't be as performant.

Software and Accessories

The SL660 Blaze comes with more than a few items. It has both Type-C to Type-C and Type-C to Type-A USB cables and a detachable stand. These are both convenient as you can dock the drive when near your computer, and the drive will be compatible with two common types of USB ports. The drive also comes with a nice pouch for added convenience and protection, although this may increase overall bulk. The competing Kingston XS200, for its part, did include a rubber sleeve.

The drive also comes with an SSD toolbox, the Lexar SSD Dash, and support for software encryption through Lexar’s DataShield. We have previously stated that hardware encryption with a Self-Encrypting Drive (SED) tends not to be a priority for consumer drives and is otherwise potentially inconsistent. Lexar offers a software solution as a checkbox for their feature list, but it is actually usable and useful even if it’s something you could do yourself on other drives with the appropriate software. Likewise, we like to have a SSD toolbox even if it’s generally unnecessary.

A Closer Look

The USB interface can also be its own bottleneck regardless of the internal SSD. Portable drives are also usually streamlined and made to be efficient, which in other words means they often have a DRAM-less design that would benefit from the performance-boosting Host Memory Buffer (HMB) tech — but that doesn't work over the USB interface. Both of these issues present challenges for external drives: Most users use these types of drives for large files or image backups, which are essentially large, sequential file transfers. This type of work can be limited by the interface or by the sequential write speed of the drive, with the latter being impacted by the lack of HMB.

Most previous portable drives came with ASMedia’s bridge chips, such as the ASM2362 and ASM2364 for 10Gbps and 20Gbps, respectively. Portable units tend to have an independent drive with its own controller and a separate bridge chip to handle communication with the host, for example, with two lanes of PCIe 3.0 on one side and USB 3.2 Gen 2x2, at up to 20 Gbps, on the other. The newer SM2320 chip from Silicon Motion, as used on the SL660 Blaze and XS2000, instead provides an embedded or hybrid design with everything in one package. This pairs very well with the streamlined intentions of a portable SSD.

The SL660 Blaze has a sleek, aluminum exterior that certainly lends itself to the gaming aesthetic, even without RGB enabled. It’s otherwise clean, with the rear side listing the capacity/model and serial number. The interior shares the black coloring with a bit of protection. Of course, this is not a drive you would have to shuck, given the nature of the prominent SM2320 controller. The black PCB has no DRAM but has four flash packages with two on each side.

The controller, labeled SM2320G, looks to have been manufactured about a year ago. SMI is proud of this quad-channel design, able to manage up to 4TB of flash in a tight 9x9 mm package. While there are disadvantages to having a single chip for a portable drive, the advantages of reduced size and cost generally outweigh them. We also see the four LEDs on the edge of the board, which, as tested, were not controllable but rather just shifted between various colors.

The flash modules are produced by Longsys and labeled 29F208EMLCER. From the “29,” we can tell this is Intel or Micron flash, as in MT29 from the IMFT days, at 2Tb or 256GB per chip in an 8-bit configuration for a total of 1TB. It’s similar to the 96-layer Micron TLC we saw on the XS2000. This is an older flash but is perfectly suitable for a quad-channel portable drive.

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Comparison Products

We compare the Lexar SL660 Blaze to other popular portable SSDs including SanDisk’s Extreme and Extreme Pro (both v2), the Samsung X5 and T7, the WD Black P50, the Adata SE900G, and of course the Kingston XS2000. Two of these drives are at the 2TB capacity but this should offer no advantage in this drive class.

Game Scene Loading - Final Fantasy XIV

Final Fantasy XIV Shadowbringers is a free real-world game benchmark that easily and accurately compares game load times without the inaccuracy of using a stopwatch.

The SL660 Blaze is marketed as a gaming drive, so it’s nice to see it delivers a very good result here. SSDs, in general, offer the best loading times, and it can be nice to have a portable option if you’re on the go or if you use a gaming laptop.

Trace Testing – PCMark 10 Storage Benchmark

PCMark 10 is a trace-based benchmark that uses a wide-ranging set of real-world traces from popular applications and everyday tasks to measure the performance of storage devices.

The 1TB SL660 Blaze is in the middle of the pack here, right alongside the Kingston XS2000. We see better results from the SanDisk Extreme Pro v2, which has DRAM, and the Samsung X5, which utilizes Thunderbolt 3 and also has DRAM.

Transfer Rates – DiskBench

We use the DiskBench storage benchmarking tool to test file transfer performance with a custom, 50GB dataset. We copy 31,227 files of various types, such as pictures, PDFs, and videos to a new folder and then follow-up with a reading test of a newly-written 6.5GB zip file.

The 1TB SL660 Blaze, along with the XS2000, is on top of the USB-based portable drives. It offers very fast transfer times and is only beaten by the ThunderBolt 3-equipped X5.

Synthetic Testing - ATTO / CrystalDiskMark

ATTO and CrystalDiskMark (CDM) are free and easy-to-use storage benchmarking tools that SSD vendors commonly use to assign performance specifications to their products. Both of these tools give us insight into how each device handles different file sizes.

Users transfer files of various sizes regularly with portable drives, so it’s important to look at transfer speeds for different block sizes in ATTO. The SL660 Blaze only comes up short for sequential reads versus the Samsung X5, which again has a ThunderBolt 3 interface. It also falls slightly behind the ASM2364-based drives at larger sequential write sizes, which points to a difference in controller limitations.

CrystalDiskMark, that most popular of SSD benchmarks, just shows the interface's limits for peak sequential reads and writes. We see a bit of a different story with random performance. Random write performance is quite good, and the SL660 Blaze again matches the XS2000 while falling behind only the X5 at low queue depth. Reduced write latency may be a product of the hybrid design, as writes require acknowledgment. However, we see the SM2320 drives falling behind along with Samsung’s T7 Touch during a low queue depth read workload.

This is likely due to the controller being DRAM-less - the same is also true of the T7’s Pablo controller - which can exacerbate the limitations of the interface. Low queue depth random reads are often utilized as a guideline for general user experience, yet we saw the SL660 Blaze do quite well with the Final Fantasy XIV benchmark - at least in comparison to other portable SSDs. There is simply a performance threshold where you get most of the gains of a solid state drive, but portables are limited by interface. This illustrates why a DRAM-less design like the SM2320 can still be optimal for a portable drive, and certainly so for gaming.

Sustained Write Performance, Cache Recovery and Temperature

Official write specifications are only part of the performance picture. Most SSDs implement a write cache, which is a fast area of (usually) pseudo-SLC programmed flash that absorbs incoming data. Sustained write speeds can suffer tremendously once the workload spills outside of the cache and into the "native" TLC or QLC flash. We use Iometer to hammer the SSD with sequential writes for 15 minutes to measure both the size of the write cache and performance after the cache is saturated. We also monitor cache recovery via multiple idle rounds.

Continuing from the Crystal Disk Mark results above, we can then speculate that a DRAM-less SSD may still have significant shortfalls as a secondary effect. This is clearly the case in the write saturation test.

Our results are very similar to what we saw with the XS2000. The drive writes at maximum speed, or 1.8Gbps, for approximately 55s, for a total cache size of around 100GB. From what we understand these drives utilize a hybrid cache, with 6GB of static and the rest being dynamic.

After the cache is exhausted, the sequential write performance is very erratic. The drive is folding to native TLC which eventually frees up enough SLC for a brief spike in write throughput, before falling back down. Overall post-SLC sequential write bandwidth is around 200MBps, which is certainly not great and is reminiscent of some QLC-based desktop drives. The T7 Touch relies on a much smaller cache but then engages direct-to-TLC. For that reason, it is faster and its more consistent post-SLC performance can out-write the SL660 Blaze and XS2000.

DRAM-less drives tend to have weaker post-SLC performance due to larger SLC cache sizes, fewer flash channels, and an overall design philosophy that benefits from the slower folding state. While the T7 outpaces the SL660 Blaze and XS2000 it still falls behind the rest of the drives in sustained writes, and interface limitations squeeze it with shorter writes.

Cache recovery on the SL660 Blaze was similar to the XS2000, with the static portion recovering relatively rapidly and the dynamic portion requiring more time. However, it’s a fairly reasonable response given how this drive will be used. Those regularly doing large, sustained writes, which could include videographers, for example, might want to look at a different portable drive, but this cache should be adequate for gaming even in a fuller-drive state.

We had good thermal results from the XS2000 but we would expect them to be even better with the SL660 Blaze due to its aluminum case and interior design. This proved to be true as the surface was 5C cooler than the XS2000’s under load, at 31C, with the drive itself reaching around 7C less, or 64C, as measured by an IR gun. We certainly saw no throttling and idle temperatures were also good.

Test Bench and Testing Notes

We use a Rocket Lake platform with most background applications such as indexing, windows updates, and anti-virus disabled in the OS to reduce run-to-run variability. Each SSD is prefilled to 50% capacity and tested as a secondary device. Unless noted, we use active cooling for all SSDs.

Conclusion

It is difficult for us not to compare the Lexar SL660 Blaze to the Kingston XS2000 because the internal hardware is similar, and our test results point out plenty of similarities. The SL660 Blaze has a higher price point, which is sensible as it offers more than the XS2000. For example, it comes with an extra cable, a detachable stand, RGB functionality, and software support that includes encryption. It maintains shock resistance but is also larger and weighs more. In a sense, this makes it less portable, but the aluminum body and overall design make it more attractive. Plus, it remains sufficiently convenient.

This is being marketed as a gaming drive which tends not to mean a whole lot in the SSD space — for now. However, the angular design and presence of RGB are probably sufficient to match the requirements of such a moniker. The detachable stand is also a nice feature when considering the possibilities of portable gaming, even if used with a console. 

The Sl600's warranty is strong and the drive feels durable, particularly with the pouch, which we feel is a strong selling point if you’re moving the drive around a lot. Although we question the usefulness of software encryption with a gaming drive, software support is a nice touch, but there are other options available that don’t require Lexar's proprietary software. We wouldn’t mind some OEM software for drive cloning, though.

Aside from some minor pitfalls, the SL600's performance is actually not bad for a portable drive. The one area it does fall short is during sustained, sequential write workloads, which exhibit very poor post-cache performance. The cache design itself is robust even if the cache is not particularly large, but this issue will be more troublesome with a fuller drive. While this is not usually a problem for gaming, if you also want to also use this drive to transfer files, particularly larger ones, some alternatives are more attractive in terms of speed and consistency.

Therefore, the SL660 Blaze’s traits are a bit of a double-edged sword. You don’t really need anything special for gaming, so what you are really paying for — versus, say, the XS2000 — is basically aesthetics. The extra cable and the standalone dock are useful additions but may be of situational use. It’s possible to get a cheaper drive if performance is your top priority, making this a luxury item.

ADATA’s SE900G also offers RGB and the extra cable but appears to have a lower MSRP. Is it worth a premium for the dock and Lexar’s software package? Probably not, but we do feel Lexar did a good job of making a product with a premium feel, although we would have liked to see a 2TB option given the size of games these days. That being said, the dock might be useful for certain users.

If you want a portable SSD with a “gaming” feel, something that also feels a bit premium with the aluminum enclosure, pouch, stand, and RGB, then this is the ticket. We feel the market is inundated with gaming-oriented SSDs that are really an excuse to charge more for aesthetics and semi-useful features. We will say that it’s nice Lexar includes a ton of accessories, but someone willing to do a bit of legwork can likely find something just as good for less money. The Lexar SL660 Blaze is for the gamer who has everything.

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The WD Black D30 is simply designed external storage for your games without any frills like RGB. It will work on modern consoles as well as PC, whether macOS or Windows, but is aimed at older titles for use on the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S. The variant we are testing today is for the Xbox and comes with a Game Pass Ultimate code to get your gaming journey started.

This drive is recommended for last-generation titles, because the current consoles have high-bandwidth NVMe drives and their recommended expansion options are also quite fast. 10 Gbps USB won’t cut it for that. On PC, DirectStorage is still in its infancy, but that API is designed for NVMe anyway. That being said, 10 Gbps is sufficient bandwidth for normal game loading, and the D30’s 2TB option is particularly compelling to hold a game collection.

WD’s original SN550 and its SanDisk counterpart made for a solid portable drive when paired with an enclosure. WD thought so, too, as they made models with this hardware and the ASM2362 bridge chip. While these drives are DRAM-less and HMB does not pass over USB, the overall design was such that sustained performance remained quite good. We will have to test the D30 to see if it holds up to that. Many manufacturers have been “nerfing” drives lately, including the SN550, so we’ll see what separates the D30 from its peers.

Specifications

The WD Black D30 is available at 500GB, 1TB, and 2TB capacities. The price per gigabyte goes from $0.16 to $0.09 as the capacity increases, making the 2TB the best value. Games are always getting larger, so that may be the best investment regardless. While internally the drive is in the typical M.2 2280 form factor, externally the drive is attached by USB via the USB-C port with an included Type-C to Type-A cable. Although somewhat bulky, the drive is a relatively lightweight 125 grams.

The drive is not rated in any special way but comes with a stand and is bus-powered. The casing does seem thick, so it should offer some protection. As the drive is limited by the USB 3.1 interface, that is 10 Gbps SuperSpeed+, it’s only rated for up to 900 MBps with regard to sequential reads and writes. The warranty is unexceptional at three years.

Software and Accessories

The D30 arrives with a stand and a single USB Type-C to Type-A cable. Software should not be required for console use. A Type-C to Type-C cable would have been a nice inclusion for PC and Mac users, although strictly speaking it is not necessary. As mentioned above, the drive also comes with a Game Pass Ultimate code.

A Closer Look

The WD D30 comes in a utilitarian (but not unattractive) black and white casing. It’s likely the casing would provide some protection to the SSD inside, but it seems larger than necessary. The case has a single USB-C port and a status indicator LED. Details about the drive, such as the capacity, are written on the side. This particular color scheme is for the Xbox version that we received for testing; there’s also a pure-black model.

The internal structure does seem to have some ruggedness to it. There is a green PCB to facilitate the M.2 NVMe-to-USB-C conversion. The internal drive appears to be a WD SN550.

A closer look at the drive confirms our expectations as we spot SanDisk’s 20-82-10023-A1 controller, which is used by the SN550 and SN570. This is a DRAM-less, 4-channel design. Besides the PMIC, we also spot the flash - SanDisk 060523, as utilized on the original SN550. This would be 96-layer BiCS4 TLC from Kioxia, with 512Gbit or 64GB dies in a 1TB package for a 16DP configuration.

The bridge chip is the ASMedia ASM2362, a popular alternative to JMicron’s JMS583 and Realtek’s RTL9210B. This bridges x2 PCIe 3.0 to USB 3.1 at 10Gbps. Most 20 Gbps portable drives utilize its faster sibling, the ASM2364. ASMedia lists the ASM2362 as USB3.1 Gen2 (USB 3.1) which is SuperSpeed+ and is equivalent to USB3.2 Gen 2x1. This has more than twice the bandwidth of SuperSpeed 5 Gbps, or USB 3.0 (USB Gen 3.2 1x1) due to improved encoding.

Basically, the chip has two lanes of PCIe 3.0 on the drive side and a 10 Gbps interface on the USB side, for a performance peak around 900 MBps in this case. The JMS583 is popular in many “DIY” enclosures but had early firmware issues, while the Realtek RTL9210B is often considered the best of the bunch. The RTL9210B, though, does have the advantage of working with SATA drives.

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Comparison Products

The WD Black D30 1TB will be compared to other external drives we've tested, including the Samsung X5, the Kingston XS2000, the SanDisk Extreme v2, WD’s My Passport SSD, Crucial's X8, WD’s P50, and Samsung’s T7 Touch, all at 1TB. This lineup includes a variety of controllers, flash, and bridge chips.

Game Scene Loading - Final Fantasy XIV

Final Fantasy XIV Shadowbringers is a free real-world game benchmark that easily and accurately compares game load times without the inaccuracy of using a stopwatch.

This is sold as a gaming drive, so loading times are important. That being said, there’s only so much to be gained by going to a faster SSD, especially once you hit NVMe drives. Of course, the external interface can still be limiting. Here the D30 does adequately, but is far from the best.

Trace Testing – PCMark 10 Storage Benchmark

PCMark 10 is a trace-based benchmark that uses a wide-ranging set of real-world traces from popular applications and everyday tasks to measure the performance of storage devices.

The D30 does fairly well here, sticking with the middle of the pack. The X8, which has DRAM, is on top, while Samsung’s DRAM-less T7 Touch disappoints.

Transfer Rates – DiskBench

We use the DiskBench storage benchmarking tool to test file transfer performance with a custom, 50GB dataset. We copy 31,227 files of various types, such as pictures, PDFs, and videos to a new folder and then follow-up with a reading test of a newly-written 6.5GB zip file.

This bandwidth-limited test shows the 10 Gbps drives more or less in a pack. with the faster interface drives pulling ahead. Most notable here is that the D30 falls behind with writes, which will be investigated further below.

Synthetic Testing - ATTO / CrystalDiskMark

ATTO and CrystalDiskMark (CDM) are free and easy-to-use storage benchmarking tools that SSD vendors commonly use to assign performance specifications to their products. Both of these tools give us insight into how each device handles different file sizes.

ATTO mirrors DiskBench’s results, being limited by the interface. CrystalDiskMark also demonstrates this with its sequential tests. The D30 does beat the T7 Touch and XS2000 - the latter with a DRAM-less, hybrid controller - with 4K random reads. Factoring in writes though, it only beats the T7 Touch. We can assume the D30 is read-optimized and likely intended to have poor write performance given that it’s meant to be a gaming drive and not for portable transfers.

Sustained Write Performance, Cache Recovery and Temperature

Official write specifications are only part of the performance picture. Most SSDs implement a write cache, which is a fast area of (usually) pseudo-SLC programmed flash that absorbs incoming data.  Sustained write speeds can suffer tremendously once the workload spills outside of the cache and into the "native" TLC or QLC flash. We use Iometer to hammer the SSD with sequential writes for 15 minutes to measure both the size of the write cache and performance after the cache is saturated. We also monitor cache recovery via multiple idle rounds.

The D30 writes at around 800 MBps for approximately 16 seconds, indicating an SLC cache of 12-13GB. This matches our expectation from the SN550, which tends to have around 12.5GB of static pSLC. Static SLC usually makes for more consistent post-SLC performance, and in this case it is also very fast to recover. This cache will not shrink and 12GB should be enough for small write bursts.

After the cache runs out, the D30 drops down to around 220 MBps. This is of course far lower than what we saw with both the original and new 1TB SN550s, although direct-to-TLC performance remains consistent otherwise. This seems to indicate that, indeed, the D30 is not intended for sustained writes but is instead a drive designed to store and read games. This is therefore not a drive that should be repurposed or shucked.

The D30 only hit around 60C, by SMART, after a 350GB transfer. This should be well below throttling, which is not surprising given the environment and reduced write performance.

Test Bench and Testing Notes

We use a Rocket Lake platform with most background applications such as indexing, windows updates, and anti-virus disabled in the OS to reduce run-to-run variability. Each SSD is prefilled to 50% capacity and tested as a secondary device. Unless noted, we use active cooling for all SSDs.

Conclusion

The WD Black D30 neither surprises nor truly disappoints. We know what to expect from an SN550 and a 10 Gbps bridge chip by now. This drive is designed to be simple, and it is. It’s designed to store games, and that’s what it does. That latter point suggests that this drive is best at higher capacities, particularly 2TB, and that’s what we would recommend. We won’t knock it at 1TB for that, but 500GB seems a bit impoverished when considering its price per gigabyte.

The performance results would suggest this drive underperforms expectations, which is true, but if you’re buying this to store games then these metrics don’t mean a whole lot. This drive would disappoint if repurposed for transfers or shucked. The write performance, particularly sequential and sustained, leaves much to be desired, especially after the good numbers we’ve seen from this hardware in the past. This means WD is selling this strictly for the gaming world and is not super concerned beyond that.

There are plenty of portable SSDs out there that will accomplish effectively the same thing and more. This is therefore a bit of a specialized SKU and it should be treated as such. There’s not a lot of frills like a five-year warranty, extra cables, RGB, etc. It’s just a basic drive designed to hold past-generation console games. The design is practical if uninspired and we have no real issues with the build quality, although it is excessively large. On the whole, this drive is unexciting, but it serves a purpose.

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When it comes to picking the best SSD, you'll need a mix of fast speeds, long-lasting endurance and good thermal performance. But when it comes to deals, none are quite as good as this.

SanDisk’s Extreme Pro 1TB Internal SSD has now seen its price chopped by over $320 — down to just $129.99 at Best Buy.

• Best SSD Deals
• Best deals on tech and PC hardware

The Extreme Pro gives you maximum read/write speeds of 3,400 and 2,800 MB/s, respectively, paired with SanDisk’s nCache 3.0 for multi-tier caching.

It also comes with SanDisk's SSD Dashboard software, where you'll be able to analyze the drive, update the firmware and the like. You'll also get a super long 5-year manufacturer warranty. 

At 1TB, this drive's large enough to be both a fantastic boot drive and load up plenty of games rapidly, making it a great option to speed up your build for cheap.

Data security is of the utmost importance to many professionals, especially those governed by regulatory requirements such as HIPAA, GDPR, GLBA, PCI-DSS, CCPA, etc. Those users must meet strict handling requirements and leverage encryption technologies to keep data away from unauthorized access. This is especially important with the precipitous rise in ransomware attacks.

Cigent is a data security company whose primary intent is to keep your data safe, and it has a portable SSD for those who not only need to securely store their data for compliance, but who also desire responsive access for a smooth and speedy workflow. Thanks to an enterprise-grade SSD controller and paired with Kioxia's BiCS4 TLC flash, the K2 offers complying performance, exceeding 1 GBps read/write in our testing.

On the security front, Cigent’s K2 Secure SSD offers a zero-trust and continuous authentication approach to defend against ransomware, placing protections as close to your data as possible. The K2 comes with special firmware and hardware-accelerated AES 256-bit encryption that works in conjunction with the company’s D3E software. Together, these technologies keep your data secure from ransomware without a detrimental impact on performance

Specifications

The K2 Secure SSD is available in capacities of 480GB, 1TB, and 2TB, carrying sequential performance ratings of up to 1,000 MBps read/write. Cigent opted to overprovision the K2 a little more from the factory than most competing solutions for reliability and performance consistency, but the company only backs the hardware with a very short one-year warranty. This is even more difficult tot ake given the extremely high price per GB. Our 1TB sample sells at $600, roughly double the cost of Samsung’s much faster, Thunderbolt 3-powered X5. To be fair though, the Samsung X5 is nowhere near as secure. 

Software and Accessories

The main selling point of this SSD is its encryption support and software management. Currently, Cigent focuses on the Windows ecosystem, securing data with what the company calls its Dynamic Data Defense Engine (D3E), but the company is also working on macOS and Linux support.

Essentially, if the software detects any foul play or the PC is power cycled, it will kick K2 and the data offline until you log back into it. It can also capture data access logs for incident response. And the drive features TrueErase, which verifies all data previously stored has been erased after a wipe attempt, if you purchase and unlock D3E premium, too.

To take advantage of the encryption, the K2’s software requires you to configure a PIN as well as a password. Also, it forces you to create a backup key, which can be vital in case you forget your password. Using the default PIN authentication method is a bit cumbersome as it won’t accept keyboard input, only via mouse clicks. Alternative authentication methods like fingerprint and facial recognition are much less of an inconvenience.

Additionally, if for whatever reason you need to open the K2, it comes with a T8 Torx screwdriver and an extra screw, just in case you strip or lose one.

A Closer Look

The hardware of the K2 drive was put together by Sabrent, which is evident in the case design and markings, as well as the company’s branding on the included cable. The cable is very long, too, measuring roughly 28 inches. It also comes with a USB Type-A to Type-C adapter.

The design is rather bland, with a low-quality printed brand label stuck on top, but is solid aluminum and has a sand-blasted finish that matches the aesthetic of most Apple computers. There is a power/activity light next to the USB Type-C port and the base features two rubber feet to keep the drive from slipping and sliding on most surfaces.

Internally, the K2 leverages an M.2 2280 double-sided form factor SSD based on Phison’s PS5012-E12DC NVMe SSD controller, and a JMicron JMS583 USB 3.2 Gen 2 to NVMe SSD bridge chip for communication with the host. The E12DC is closely related to the normal E12 that has made its way into many consumer SSDs, with a quad-core, 8-channel design operating at clock speeds of 666MHz, but differs in that it was developed for enterprise and data center applications.

Additionally, our sample interfaces with two 4Gb DRAM ICs (1GB total) at 1,600 MHz and comes packed with Kioxia’s BiCS4 96L TLC flash. These flash dies utilize a two-plane architecture and interface with the controller at speeds of 666 MTps. With a very consistent latency profile and robust AES 256-bit encryption support, the controller pairs well for this portable SSD.

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Comparison Products

We compare Cigent’s K2 Secure SSD against some of the best and most secure portable SSDs available. The list includes the SanDisk Extreme Pro v2, the WD_Black P50, LaCie’s Rugged SSD, G-Technology’s ArmorLock, and Samsung’s X5. We also included the Samsung T7 and a WD My Passport SSD for good measure.

Game Scene Loading - Final Fantasy XIV

Final Fantasy XIV Shadowbringers is a free real-world game benchmark that easily and accurately compares game load times without the inaccuracy of using a stopwatch.

With a total load time of 18.46 seconds, the K2 Secure SSD finds itself smack-dab in the middle of the pack on this test. It delivers competitive game load performance that isn’t too far behind that of Samsung’s much higher bandwidth X5, and nearly on par with USB 20 Gbps competitors.

Transfer Rates – DiskBench

DiskBench is a storage benchmarking tool that allows us to test the transfer or copy performance of a storage device with real data. We test external drives with three file transfers that consist of 25GB of photos (10GB of jpgs and 15GB of RAW photos), 50GB of movies, and 25GB of documents. First, we transfer each folder from a 1TB NVMe SSD to the external device; then we follow up by reading a 3.7GB 7-zip file and a 15GB movie back from the device.

In terms of writing your files, the K2 edges ahead of its USB 10 Gbps competition, offering up some very fast performance results. SanDisk’s Extreme Pro v2 and WD_Black P50 both outpace it, but only because of their higher bandwidth interface and awesome sustained write speed.c

Trace Testing – PCMark 10 Storage Test: Data Drive Benchmark

PCMark 10 is a trace-based benchmark that uses a wide-ranging set of real-world traces from popular applications and common tasks to measure the performance of storage devices. To test drives that store files rather than applications, we utilize the Data Drive Benchmark.

Cigent’s K2 delivers impressive PCMark 10 scores, ranking first place in the test pool. It not only outperformed its USB 10Gbps competition, but also the USB 20Gbps and Thunderbolt 3 competitors by a significant margin.

Synthetic Testing - ATTO / iometer

iometer is an advanced and highly configurable storage benchmarking tool while ATTO is a simple and free application that SSD vendors commonly use to assign sequential performance specifications to their products. Both of these tools give us insight into how the device handles different file sizes.

Cigent’s K2 Secure SSD offers solid sequential performance across all block sizes, only limited by what its interface allows. It outperforms most of the SSDs in its class, not only delivering fast sequential speeds, but also rapid random access times.

Sustained Write Performance, Cache Recovery, and Temperature

Write speed and temperature are two important and interrelated metrics for external devices. Official write specifications are only part of the performance picture. Most SSDs implement a write cache, which is a fast area of (usually) pseudo-SLC programmed flash that absorbs incoming data. Sustained write speeds can suffer tremendously once the workload spills outside of the cache and into the "native" TLC or QLC flash.

We use iometer to hammer the SSD with sequential writes for 15 minutes to measure both the size of the write cache and performance after the cache is saturated. We also monitor cache recovery via multiple idle rounds as well as the temperature of the drive via the S.M.A.R.T. data and an IR thermometer to see when (or if) thermal throttling kicks in and how it impacts performance.

While very small, there seems to be an SLC cache on the K2. The Cogent K2 wrote at a rate of 1,089 MBps for the first 50GB, before degrading to an average write speed of 1,049 MBps for the remainder of the test. Overall, these are solid results, offering high performance that shouldn’t slow down even after being bombarded with writes. After filling the K2 Secure SSD to roughly 50%, the SSD’s surface temperature measured no more than 44 degrees Celsius and no thermal throttling slowed it down.

Conclusion

Cigent’s K2 Secure SSD is a top-performing portable SSD that is as fast as it is secure. Powered by the enterprise-grade Phison E12DC controller, it outpaced the majority of the competition in today’s testing. It is a powerhouse that not only delivers responsive file access but also very consistent write performance when hammered. Without the alliance with Phison, it would be hard for Cigent to break into the secure SSD space as it has with this new drive.  

Cigent is primarily a software company though, and it shows. The K2 is expensive, with premium unlocks that ask for more money, exploiting a niche use to leverage its hefty MSRPs while only backing the hardware with a very short warranty. While we normally see portable SSDs backed by three-year or five-year warranties, the K2 comes backed by a measly one year of coverage. This is not indicative of a prosumer product. Not to mention, it took multiple back and forth emails to the company to attain something as simple as official performance ratings...something that should be at the forefront of a hardware vendor’s marketing.

But, while these little nuances perplexed us, the fact that this SSD comes with such robust security, capable of defense against ransomware and other data compromising threats at any given moment, is quite impressive. Cigent’s K2 Secure SSD is most definitely one of the most secure portable SSDs we’ve had our hands-on, though not always the most convenient. While it costs quite a bit up front, its high cost may be worth it for many large companies, compared to losing hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars due to poor security practices.

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More hardware deals are popping up as the holiday season draws closer. We've got an entire page just for the best deals on tech and even one dedicated to the best deals on SSDs. Each of them are updated every day with new deals.

This offer is for the SanDisk 1TB Extreme Pro external SSD. It's usually priced around $279 but is available today for just $189 at Amazon.

The biggest draw to this external SSD is the portable design. It has a tough exterior housing that measures just under 5" tall and weighs only 5.6 ounces. The outer shell is made from aluminum to help dissipate heat. This model is compatible with both USB-C and USB-A interfaces.

You can expect a maximum storage capacity of 1TB. Other capacitors are available, but this offer is for the 1TB model. It has read speeds as high as 1050 MBps.

Go to the SanDisk Extreme Pro External SSD product page on Amazon for more details and checkout information.  

Amazon Prime Day offers are expected to last through most of October 14th. If you're looking for Prime Day SSD deals, check out this offer on the SanDisk SSD Plus 1TB edition drive.

Amazon lists the 1TB maximum storage capacity as 1000GB, but that's incorrect—it's a standard 1000GB drive. Still, that's plenty of storage for the price. If you want even more capacity, check out the 2TB model for $190. It's a higher price per GB, but twice the capacity means you're far less likely to run out of space. Or, you know, just grab two of these for the same capacity and less money if you're using a desktop with lots of spare area for additional drives.

Under ideal conditions, the read/write speeds can get as high as 535/450MBps. That's typical of modern 2.5-inch SATA SSDs. Since it uses the ubiquitous SATA connector, it can also work in older PCs and laptops.

The current offer is valid through October 14th. Visit the official SanDisk SSD Plus 1TB page to check out this deal yourself.

Featuring Samsung’s latest 92-layer TLC V5 V-NAND flash and a DRAMless NVMe controller Samsung’s T7 is a cost effect portable SSD that will suit the needs of many. With optional to use AES 256-bit encrypted password protection, it is not only fast, but it is also secure, too. However, due to the DRAMless architecture, performance lags most of the competition. Still, if you are looking for a speedy and secure portable SSD, Samsung’s T7 is well worth your consideration at a much lower cost per GB than the Touch variant.

Delivering 10 Gbps performance in a sleek and well thought out design, we found Samsung’s T7 Touch quite well rounded when we reviewed it earlier this year. It’s AES 256-bit encrypted password protection with built-in touch sensor put it over the top though. Even if you forget your password, it allowed you a second form of unlocking and it comes in two colors. However, it commanded a premium price given the innovative design.

Now available in Titan Gray, Indigo Blue, Metallic Red, Samsung’s latest T7 portable SSD foregoes the Touch treatment instead it stops by the anodizing shop for some more colorful treatment instead. Not only that, but Samsung’s T7 brings pricing down to much more competitive levels per capacity; without the fingerprint sensor, street prices are roughly 15-20% lower than the Touch variant and could be lower with a Samsung promo code.

Specifications

Features

In addition to the three color options, Samsung’s T7 is available in capacities of 500GB, 1TB, and 2TB. And, in terms of speed, Samsung rates the T7 to hit speeds of up to 1,050/1,000 MBps read/write over a USB 3.2 Gen 2 10Gbps link.

Samsung’s T7 features the company’s TurboWrite SLC cache acceleration technology all other SSDs share. That means there is a pool of SLC programmed NAND flash that is used to absorb inbound write requests. However, once the TurboWrite cache fills, write speed can degrade quite a bit, and depending on the model of T7 you purchase, the device’s base write performance can vary quite a bit. We will cover its sustained write performance a bit more on the next page.   

As is usual with most portable SSDs, Samsung’s T7 doesn’t come with an endurance rating or an IP rating, but it comes backed by a rather short 3-years warranty. For us this is something strange to see when the company keeps touting their superior reliability, yet competitors like SanDisk’s Extreme offers up a premium 5-year warranty and IP55 water-dust resistance. None the less, Samsung rates the T7 to sustain falls of up to 2 meters.

Software and Accessories

Samsung includes two premium 18-inch long USB cables with the T7, one USB 3.2 Gen 2 USB C to A cable and one USB 3.2 Gen 2 USB C to C cable. The company also embedded the management software on the device. Samsung’s Portable SSD Software can be used on both Windows and Mac systems for setting up the password protection and receiving the latest firmware updates. If you have an Android device, Samsung also provides a mobile app for use on smartphones and tablets.

A Closer Look

As mentioned, Samsung’s T7 comes in three color options and we have been sampled Indigo Blue today. The T7 comes in a full metal body closure that not only looks sleek but is also what gives the device its physical durability and aids it in cooling. Samsung’s T7 measures 85 x 57 x 8mm, weighs in at just 58 grams.

With such a small mass, it still does a decent job of maintaining reasonable thermals. Inside the metal enclosure is an ePCM or encapsulated Phase Change Material that takes the brunt of the thermal load during heavy transfers, absorbing excess heat and then gradually releasing it. This works in conjunction with a firmware feature called Dynamic Thermal Guard, which manages the overall device temperature and will thermal throttle performance as needed to maintain an acceptable level of heat output.

The T7 has a blue colored power indicator light so, when you plug it in, you know it is working. Interfacing the SSD with the host is an ASMedia ASM 2362 PCIe Gen3 x2 NVMe 1.3c to USB 3.2 Gen2 bridge chip. It supports S.MA.R.T. data passthrough as well as Trim, link power management, and UASP (USB Attached SCSI Protocol) for best performance.

Powering the T7 touch is Samsung’s latest DRAMless NVMe controller, inscribed “Pablo” on the package. Since it is of a DRAMless design, it updates the FTL tables directly on the NAND, resulting in slower performance over DRAM-based designs. The company didn’t reveal any details about it, but based on the slower performance than our T7 Touch at 1TB, we believe it to be of a 4-channel design and possibly having three ARM Cortex R5 cores (read/write/host interaction) rather than five cores as per the 970 EVO Plus to help save on production costs.

Furthermore, our 2TB model interfaces with thirty-two 512Gb dies of Samsung’s 92L TLC V5 V-NAND flash. Operating at 1 Gbps, they are faster than most competitors flash that operates at up to 666-800 MT/s and require just 1.2V. Nine percent of the NAND’s capacity is set aside for over-provisioning to help with bad block management and other background FTL tasks.

Comparison Products

Today, we pit the 2TB Samsung T7 against the 1TB T7 Touch we received back in January to see how much of a difference capacity makes for performance. As well, we threw in SanDisk’s Extreme Pro, a LaCie Rugged SDD, and Crucial’s X8 as direct 10 GBps competition. We also added in Samsung’s top of the line X5 and SanDisk’s slower 5Gbps Extreme as well as a LaCie Mobile Drive, a portable HDD, all or good measure.

Transfer Rates – DiskBench

DiskBench is a storage benchmarking tool that allows us to test the transfer or copy performance of a storage device with real data. We test external drives with three file transfers that consist of 25GB of photos (10GB of jpgs and 15GB of RAW photos), 50GB of movies, and 25GB of documents. First, we transfer each folder from a 1TB NVMe SSD to the external device; then we follow up by reading a 3.7GB 7-zip file and a 15GB movie back from the device.

Samsung’s T7 clearly performs slower than its DRAM-based rivals like the SanDisk Extreme Pro and Crucial X8. With transfer results that leave it in fifth and sixth place overall, the 2TB Samsung T7 is typically less responsive than the 1TB T7 Touch. And managing fifth place in reading back our test files, the T7’s read performance also lagged some of the faster competitors. It did manage to out read the LaCie Rugged SSD, however.

Trace Testing – PCMark 10 Storage Test: Data Drive Benchmark

PCMark 10 is a trace-based benchmark that uses a wide-ranging set of real-world traces from popular applications and common tasks to measure the performance of storage devices. To test drives that store files rather than applications, we utilize the Data Drive Benchmark.

As we saw in our transfer tests, the more expensive LaCie Rugged SSD and the Crucial X8 both prove to be tuned a bit better for responsiveness in these workloads than the 2TB Samsung T7. It isn’t a performance leader, but the T7 is fairly close in performance to the SanDisk’s Extreme Pro in PCMark 10’s data drive benchmark. Here it placed sixth place, just trailing the performance of the lower capacity T7 Touch.

Synthetic Testing - ATTO / iometer

iometer is an advanced and highly configurable storage benchmarking tool while ATTO is a simple and free application that SSD vendors commonly use to assign sequential performance specifications to their products. Both of these tools give us insight into how the device handles different file sizes.

In ATTO, read and write performance lag at a QD of 1, which represents most real-world transfers in consumer use cases. It lags behind all the other 10 Gbps competition, slowly ramping up in performance to just under 1,000/800 MBps read/write. At higher QDs than 1, the 2TB Samsung T7 hit peak performance figures of 976/848 MBps under sequential loads.

Due to the DRAMless architecture, Samsung T7’s random performance trails the competition, too. Due to its NVMe interface, we would have expected it to outperform the SanDisk Extreme at least, but at a QD of 1, access times are roughly 0.3/0.1 ms read/write, which is not only higher than the 1TB Touch model but higher and worse than all other SSDs compared.

Sustained Write Performance, Cache Recovery, and Temperature

Write speed and temperature are two important and inter-related metrics for external devices. We threw in this one last test to measure the performance of the drive over a 15-minute window, writing to the full span of the drive. This test reveals if the drive has a pseudo-SLC cache, which is a small portion of faster-programmed flash that absorbs incoming write workloads. We also monitor cache recovery via multiple idle rounds.  

When possible, we also log the temperature of the drive via the S.M.A.R.T. data to see when (or if) thermal throttling kicks in and how it impacts performance. Bear in mind that results will vary based on the workload and ambient air temperature.

Samsung’s 2TB T7 doesn’t have the strongest write speed out of the bunch, but in the long run, it outperformed the Crucial X8. We wrote 84GB of data to the T7 (roughly double that of the 1TB model) at a rate of 867 MBps before the TurboWrite cache filled and degraded to a final speed of 337 MBps on average from that point on. When we gave the drive some idle time, it recovered the full SLC cache back within just one minute. Additionally, with the ePCM and dynamic thermal guard, the T7 maintains very cool temperatures under load. After sustaining a few hundred GB of writes at full speed the device never exceeded 34C in a 24C room.

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If you are on the hunt for a fast and consistent 10 GBps portable SSD for your professional media editing workflow, look elsewhere. Samsung’s T7 isn’t the fastest portable SSD going by a long shot. While SSDs like the more expensive LaCie Rugged SSD and SanDisk Extreme Pro can sustain almost any write workload at full speed, but time and time again, the 2TB T7 trailed the competition due to its DRAMless architecture. Not only that, but the company’s T7 is even slower at the more expensive 2TB capacity than the 1TB T7 Touch we reviewed at the beginning of the year.

That said, it still provides ample performance for most business users and will provide am much more responsive user experience than any HDD out there. One of the biggest selling points for the T7’s password protection. No matter if the device is stolen by a random thief or even by most government agencies, the hardware-based AES 256-bit encryption will keep your data safe from prying eyes. Samsung’s T7 just isn’t as convenient as the T7 Touch without the well-designed touch sensor.

Additionally, with support for Windows, Mac, and Android-based systems, Samsung’s T7 boats compatibility with almost any device out. Regardless of the interface or system, we used in testing, Samsung’s T7 just worked. The connection also remained stable no matter what the transfer and temperatures remained well within a reasonable range, unlike some of the Thunderbolt 3 devices we have tested in the past.

We liked that Samsung provides purchasers with premium cables for the T7 though. Measuring 18,” they suit almost anyone's needs and allow for versatile positioning whether you use the device on your desktop, laptop, or tablet PC. The multiple color options are a big plus over competitors as well. Rarely do portable storage devices allow you to choose your own style in such variety. Besides the few cons against the T7, it’s still a solid performing option for those on the go. While it isn’t the fastest portable SSD going, its performance is more than acceptable for most, sustaining speeds of up to 1 GBps reach way.

Considering the company touts its reliability above everyone else with a dominating marketing share over the past decade, Samsung’s T7 comes up rather short on warranty support, though. With a short three-year warranty, the T7 lacks the support of more premium options that come with longer five-year warranties. The cheaper price over the T7 Touch helps but isn’t enough to help its value proposition qualify it as the best of the best. Additionally, while TurboWrite can help endurance quite a bit, regardless of it and the fact that Samsung’s most advanced V-NAND being used on the T7, the three-year warranty just goes to show you how much the DRAMless architecture impacts reliability and holds the device back.

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The SanDisk SSD Plus 480GB normally shows up with a $69.99 price tag. However, Newegg is selling it for just $40, which comes down to just spending 8 cents per gigabyte.

• Get the SanDisk SSD Plus 480GB for $40.

SanDisk's SSD Plus 480GB comes in your typical 2.5-inch casing so you can install it into a desktop or laptop without worries. The drive still uses the SATA III connector so compatibility won't be an issue for even the oldest of systems. The SanDisk SSD Plus 480GB is capable of delivering sequential read and write speeds up to 535 MBps and 445 MBps, respectively.

The SanDisk SSD Plus 480GB is compatible with the SanDisk SSD Dashboard software so you can monitor your SSD's health and optimize its performance. The manufacturer also includes cloning software to help you migrate over to the SanDisk SSD Plus 480GB without reinstalling Windows.

SanDisk backs the SSD Plus 480GB with a limited three-year warranty.

Should You Buy This SSD?

As usual, we highly recommend you check out our in-depth SanDisk SSD Plus review before investing in this product. 

For more savings, check out our list of best Amazon Prime Day deals and best PC hardware deals overall as well as dedicated lists of current sales on SSDs, CPUs, GPUs and gaming laptops.

As per SanDisk Japan's recent listing, the flash memory manufacturer has expanded its Extreme Pro family of high-performance M.2 NVMe SSDs with a new 2TB drive.

The Extreme Pro 2TB is an M.2 2280 SSD that respects the NVMe 1.3 protocol and communicates with your system through a standard PCIe 3.0 x4 M.2 port. Like its siblings, the drive uses SanDisk's in-house eight-channel, three-core SSD controller and 64-layer 3D TLC (triple-level cell) NAND flash memory. SanDisk Japan didn't list the SSD's DRAM capacity. The Extreme Pro 2TB is equipped with SanDisk's latest nCache 3.0 feature, which is a caching technology that reportedly drives up sequential and random performance.

SanDisk Extreme Pro SSD Specs

The 2TB drive offers sequential read and write speeds up to 3,400 MBps and 2,900 MBps, respectively. The SSD delivers for 480,000 IOPS random reads and 550,000 IOPS random writes. The 2TB model also has the best endurance of all three models. It's rated for 1,200 TBW (terabytes written) and backed with a limited five-year warranty.

As usual, the Extreme Pro 2TB comes with SanDisk's SSD Dashboard software, which consists of a bunch of useful tools to monitor the SSD's health, performance and other parameters.

SanDisk hasn't listed the Extreme Pro 2TB on its global website yet, so the SSD isn't widely available yet. There's no official word on price either. However, the 1TB model currently sells for $449, so we expect the 2TB model to cost upwards of $600.

If you feel as though you're endlessly running out of digital storage space, you probably are. With file sizes going up, SD cards and other removable storage solutions are expanding.

• Get the SanDisk 200GB SD Card for $24.00.

If you find yourself in need of some additional storage space, Amazon has the SanDisk 200GB Ultra microSDXC on the cheap as part of a Deal of the Day sale going on now.

The deal nets you the 200GB Ultra microSDXC card for just $24, which is 26% off the typical asking price of $32.49. Amazon is also offering free one-day shopping for Prime members, so it'll be at your home in no time. Considering the next biggest card is 256GB for $42.99, this is a great deal for stocking up on extra cards – you never know when you're going to need one, after all.

This mini but mighty Deal of the Day nets you plenty of space to expand your smartphone’s memory, download your favorite Netflix shows to binge to your tablet, or save all those hilarious Super Smash Bros. Ultimate stage creations from your Nintendo Switch. These cards feature up to 100MB/s transfer read speed.

SanDisk's Ultra microSDXC cards are backed by a limited lifetime warranty, save for certain countries like Canada and any others that aren't eligible. In those cases, you're still covered by a lengthy warranty of 30 years. That's probably still plenty long enough, seeing as how storage needs will have almost certainly changed drastically by then.

Professional Quality and Performance

G-Technology's Thunderbolt 3 and NVMe external SSD is ready to take the performance crown from Samsung's speedy X5. With performance numbers peaking at over 2.8GB/s read and 2.5GB/s write, G-Technology designed the mobile Pro to be a media eating beast that can even handle multi-stream 8K footage editing. With killer build quality and a five-year warranty, the G-Drive mobile Pro is a media professionals dream come true.

G-Technology, now a brand owned by Western Digital, is no newcomer to high-speed storage devices. The company has designed external storage devices specifically for creative professionals for years. It should come as no surprise, then, that the company's latest device sports some of the fastest speeds in the industry and has the looks to match.

The G-Drive mobile Pro has an aluminum heatsink at its core to keep it cool, even under the heaviest of workflows. It was designed to take a beating, too: The drive has a 1000lb crush-proof rating and can survive a three-meter drop in its durable shock-resistant case.

While Thunderbolt 3 devices are typically aimed towards Apple fanatics that have workflows dominated by multimedia editing, Windows support for the interface is coming along, abet slowly. By default, the G-Drive mobile Pro SSD comes plug and play for Mac with the HFS+ file system, but it also comes with Paragon's HFS+ for Windows software that provides compatibility with Windows. If you don't plan to use an Apple device, G-Technology’s Format Wizard can format the drive for native Windows use, too.

Specifications

G-Technology’s G-Drive mobile Pro SSD is currently available in capacities of 500GB and 1TB. The 500GB model retails for $399.99, and the 1TB model weighs in at $699.99. Both drives are rated for up to 2.8/2.4 GB/s of sequential read/write throughput over the Thunderbolt 3 interface.

Like many other modern consumer SSDs, the mobile Pro SSD comes with a respectable endurance rating of 300TBW for the 500GB model and 400TBW for the 1TB model (similar to the WD Black NVMe M.2 SSD). It also has a lengthy five-year warranty, just as a professional product should, even though that isn’t always the case.

The G-Drive mobile Pro pulls its power over a single Thunderbolt 3 connection, but it is only compatible with actual Thunderbolt 3 ports. It will not work with USB Type C ports.

Closer Look

G-Technology includes a 0.5m Thunderbolt 3 cable along with warranty and quick start pamphlets.

The G-Drive mobile Pro measures 112 x 80 x 17 mm and weighs a little over 0.45 lbs. (0.2kg). The casing has a rubber-like feel for added grip and to prevent slippage on smooth surfaces.

A Western Digital SN720 NVMe SSD hides within the casing. This is the OEM version of the SanDisk Extreme Pro and WD Black NVMe SSDs that you can buy in retail channels. In fact, the drive even registers as a SanDisk Extreme Pro SSD in Windows device manager.

This M.2 SSD boasts high-end performance figures on its own with its 64-layer 3D TLC flash and WD's in-house eight-channel NVMe controller. Usable capacity in Windows comes in at 931.5 GB after formatting.

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Performance Results

Comparison Products

Today we're comparing the 1TB G-Technology G-Drive mobile Pro SSD to a few other NVMe Thunderbolt 3 devices, like the high-end 1TB Patriot Evlvr and 1TB Samsung X5. We also included the 1TB SanDisk Extreme Portable SSD, a USB 3.1 Gen 2 product with SATA-like performance, and finally, our DIY WD Blue 3D SSD and HDD USB 3.0 solutions.

ATTO

ATTO is a simple and free application that SSD vendors commonly use to assign sequential performance specifications to their products. It also gives us insight into how the device handles different file sizes.

G-Technology’s G-Drive mobile Pro SSD easily matched its rated 2.8/2.4GB/s sequential read/write specification. The drive is faster overall than the Samsung X5, despite a notable dip in performance at the 64KB file size during our read workload.

CrystalDiskMark

CrystalDiskMark (CDM) is a simple and easy to use storage benchmarking tool.

The G-Drive mobile Pro SSD surpasses the Samsung X5 during a sequential write test at a QD (Queue Depth) of 32, ranking first. The Pro maintains its leading write performance at QD1, but the X5 slips out ahead slightly during the read test. The Pro outperforms the Samsung X5 again during the 4K random tests, maintaining its first-place rank.

Transfer Rates – DiskBench

DiskBench is a storage benchmarking tool that allows us to test the read and write performance of a storage device with real data. We test external drives with three file transfers that consist of 25GB of photos (10GB of jpegs and 15GB of RAW photos), 50GB of movies, and 25GB of documents. We transfer the files from a 1TB NVMe SSD to the external device and then follow up by reading a 3.7GB 7-zip file and a 15GB movie back from the device.

The G-Drive mobile Pro delivered great performance during the initial file transfer, but it wasn't as fast during the 25GB document transfer. The G-Drive mobile Pro trailed the Samsung X5 by 268 MB/s during the document transfer.

The G-Drive mobile Pro was faster than the Samsung X5 during our read tests, again taking first place on our charts.

Trace Testing – PCMark 8 Storage Test 2.0

PCMark 8 is a trace-based benchmark that uses Microsoft Office, Adobe Creative Suite, World of Warcraft, and Battlefield 3 to measure the performance of storage devices in real-world application scenarios.

G-Technology’s G-Drive mobile Pro SSD scored a total of 5084 points and an average bandwidth of 567MB/s in PCMark 8’s storage benchmark, once again leading our test pool. 

Write Saturation and Temperature

Write speed and temperature are two important and interrelated metrics for external devices. We threw in one last test to measure the performance of the drive over a 15-minute window as we wrote to the full span of the drive. We logged the temperature of the drive via the S.M.A.R.T. data to see when (or if) thermal throttling kicks in and how it impacts performance. This test also reveals if the drive has an SLC cache, which is a small portion of faster-programmed flash that absorbs incoming write workloads. Bear in mind that results will vary based on the workload and ambient air temperature.

The G-Drive mobile Pro SSD comes equipped with an SLC write cache, so while it is rated for 2.4GB/s write speeds, that peak speed only lasts for the first 14GB of data you transfer. Sequential write performance degrades after you exceed 14GB of data, but unlike other drives, sustained performance levels off at a respectable 1.5GB/s.

As with performance, temperature is not much of concern here. Even during our extreme write bombardment, the drive stayed under 50C and was just warm to the touch.

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Conclusion

With speeds of 2.8GB/s read and up to 2.4GB/s write, the G-Technology G-Drive mobile Pro SSD is a very capable portable SSD that can transfer a terabyte of data in just 7 minutes. That makes it an excellent choice for professional 4K, 8K, and VR media editing.

The drive consistently trades blows with, and even beats, the Samsung X5 that previously held the crown of the fastest external SSD to cross our test bench. The drive even stayed cool during our demanding benchmarks, which is important to maintain a high level of performance during extended use. It even outpaced the X5 during the PCMark 8 Storage test by almost 100MB/s.

Large media files whiz quickly to and from the G-Drive mobile Pro SSD, but smaller files are a little more challenging. The only time the G-Drive let up was when we threw our 25GB folder of documents at it. During this test, the Samsung X5 beat it out by more than 260MB/s. That's something to keep in mind if you plan to use the drive for anything other than media editing. It also doesn’t support hardware-based data encryption like the X5, either.

G-Technology designed the G-Drive mobile Pro for professional users, so it comes with the price tag to match the prestige. The $300 price tag for the 500GB model and $600 asking price for the 1TB can be a real shocker to most consumers, especially considering a standard 1TB WD Black NVMe M.2 SSD goes for a just bit over $200. Most 1TB SATA SSDs also retail for less than $150. Bear in mind that there aren't many bare external Thunderbolt 3 enclosures available, so it would be challenging to create a similar do-it-yourself package for less money.

Should you get the G-Technology G-Drive mobile Pro SSD? If you regularly edit media files, we believe so. It’s sleek, it’s durable, and it’s optimized for multi-stream workflows. It eats through video faster than an HDD RAID array and is small and lightweight enough to carry in your pocket. If you need to speed up your workflow and you’ve grown tired of slower SSDs and HDDs for your day-to-day editing, the G-Drive mobile Pro SSD is a solid option.

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But Is It Really Savage?

Today, we take a look at Kingston’s latest USB 3.1 Gen 2 external SSD. The HyperX Savage EXO delivers up to 500/480 MB/s of sequential read/write throughput to help expedite your file transfers and game load times, and the edgy design looks good while it's doing it. Perhaps most importantly, it's compatible with game consoles like the Xbox One and PS4. But the specifications only paint part of the performance picture. Poor real-world write performance taints our outlook on this new external, although competitive pricing helps offset some of the drive's shortcomings.

High-speed Thunderbolt 3 NVMe external SSDs are coming to market, like the Samsung X5 and Patriot Evlvr we just reviewed. That makes it easy to overlook the other mainstream drives, but new external SSDs with the latest USB 3.1 Gen 2 interface are making their way to market with exceptional performance for the size and price.

The HyperX team has expanded its product lines greatly since their launch all the way back in 2002. Today, HyperX delivers gamer-focused products, like gaming headsets, keyboards, mouse pads, mice, and obviously RAM and storage products, that the company says offer the best quality and reliability available.

We just had to take a look for ourselves when we got wind of a new high-performance external SSD using the latest USB interface at CES 2018. Nearly ten months later, we finally have the chance. Unlike the new Thunderbolt 3 devices, the Savage EXO isn't designed only for traditional PC gamers that want fast flash storage – console gamers can take advantage of its flash goodness, too.

HyperX designed the Savage EXO for a range of applications, including expanding the storage of a game console and speeding gaming installs. The company also claims the drive will help “deliver 20% faster load times” than an HDD for a more fluid gaming experience, but that speed does come with a significant price premium over much cheaper and more capacious HDDs.

Specifications

HyperX’s Savage EXO delivers up to 500/480 MB/s of sequential read/write throughput over its USB 3.1 Gen 2 interface. The SSDs are currently available in 480GB and 960GB capacities at prices of $127.99 and $249.99, respectively. Like many external SSDs, the Savage EXO does not have an endurance restriction that limits the three-year warranty. It also comes with free technical support over the warranty period.

HyperX rates the drive with a maximum power draw up to 4.5W. That shouldn’t be a problem for most USB 3.0 ports, but the power consumption is at the specification’s maximum limit.

In addition to game console compatibility, drive support starts at Windows 7 (SP1), Mac OS X 10.9, and Linux 2.6x (and newer versions). For testing, we formatted the drive with NTFS to take advantage of TRIM in our Windows test environment. TRIM keeps performance snappy even after extended use and works flawlessly with the drive.

Closer Look

The Savage EXO has a single USB Type C port. The white indicator light shows when the device is active. Kingston includes two one-foot USB cables and a HyperX sticker in the box. One of the included cables is USB Type C to C, and the other is USB Type C to A. 

The drive measures 123.82 x 48.61 x 10.24mm and weighs in at just 56 grams, making it a very small and lightweight external. We couldn’t pry open the case to get the controller information without destroying the drive, but we know the internal SSD uses Toshiba's BiCS3 64-layer TLC flash.

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Performance Results

Comparison Products

We pitted the HyperX Savage EXO against the high-end Thunderbolt 3 Patriot Evlvr 1TB and 1TB Samsung X5 drives. We also included the 1TB SanDisk Extreme Portable SSD, which is another USB 3.1 Gen 2 product with similar specs, and an older Samsung T1. Finally, we included our USB 3.0 DIY WD Blue 3D SSD and HDD. 

ATTO

ATTO is a simple and free application that SSD vendors commonly use to assign sequential performance specifications to their products. It also gives us insight into how the device handles different file sizes.

The Savage EXO delivered a peak of 547/525 MB/s of sequential read/write throughput. The SanDisk Extreme led slightly during the small-file read and write tests.

CrystalDiskMark

CrystalDiskMark (CDM) is a simple and easy to use file benchmarking tool that many storage vendors use to assign specs to their products.

The Savage EXO provided middling performance during our sequential read and write tests at a queue depth (QD) of 32. We also tested with a lighter QD1 load that is more representative of real-world performance. The Savage EXO outperformed the Samsung Extreme slightly during those light sequential read tests, but the roles reversed during the QD1 write test.

Random performance, on the other hand, wasn't as impressive. The Savage EXO lagged even the much smaller and multiple-generations old Samsung T1. The Thunderbolt 3-based devices also opened up a sizable lead due to their faster interface and protocol.

Transfer Rates – DiskBench

We use the DiskBench storage benchmarking tool to test file transfer performance with our own custom block of real data. We test external drives with three file transfers that consist of 25GB of photos (10GB of iPhone jpgs and 15GB of RAW photos), 50GB of movies, and 25GB of documents. First, we transfer each folder from a 1TB NVMe SSD to the external device; then we follow up by reading a 3.7GB 7-zip file and a 15GB movie back from the device.

The HyperX Savage EXO showed its true colors during our real-world file transfer tests. While it was faster than the HDD in all three tests, it ranked last among the SSDs by a fairly large margin.

The Savage EXO was actually quite savage during the read tests, though. It surpassed the other USB-based drives, even the SanDisk Extreme, and delivered an average read speed of 475 MB/s in both our read tests.

Trace Testing – PCMark 8 Storage Test 2.0

PCMark 8 is a trace-based benchmark that uses Microsoft Office, Adobe Creative Suite, World of Warcraft, and Battlefield 3 to measure the performance of storage devices in real-world scenarios

HyperX’s Savage EXO outstripped both of the DIY WD Blue externals but trailed the SanDisk Extreme and older Samsung T1. It should go without saying that Thunderbolt devices are still in a league of their own compared to USB.

Write Saturation and Temperature

Write speed and temperature are two important and inter-related metrics for external devices. We threw in one last test to measure the performance of the Patriot Evlvr over the course of 15 minutes of writing to the full span of the drive. We logged the temperature of the drive via the S.M.A.R.T. data to see when (or if) thermal throttling kicks in and how it impacts performance. This test also reveals if the drive has an SLC cache, which is a small portion of fast flash that absorbs incoming write workloads. Bear in mind that results will vary based on the workload and ambient air temperature.

The Savage EXO comes with a stingy ~3GB performance-boosting SLC write cache. Sequential write performance plummets from over 500MB/s to just 166MB/s after the workload saturates the tiny cache.

The temperature reading remained rather static for most of this test. That's because the Savage EXO's SMART data doesn’t actively update when the drive is being read or written to–instead it only updates periodically. That means our measurements aren't as granular as we would like.

The EXO's temperature jumped to 50C around the 200-second mark, where it remained for the rest of the test. After the write workload finished, our SMART data logger captured a maximum temperature of 54C. The drive cooled off quickly thereafter, so we don't think extended write workloads will trigger thermal throttling.

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Conclusion

The HyperX team did a phenomenal job designing a slim and very lightweight external SSD that looks ready for battle. With slick, edgy looks and excellent read performance, the Savage EXO appears to be a great buy for those looking to get a taste of what flash has to offer. 

But products aren’t always as good as they appear on the surface. Flash can be extremely fast, but that doesn’t mean it is fast all the time. Many new SSDs, including externals, feature an SLC write cache. This means a portion of the drive has a fast layer of flash that boosts write performance, but it has a finite capacity. Unfortunately, performance plummets when the SLC cache is full. In the case of the HyperX Savage EXO, the small size of the cache is its Achilles heel.

The Savage EXO excelled in synthetic tests where its read and write performance matched or exceeded the 500/480 MB/s specs, but that was short lived. The Savage EXO displayed very good read performance during our real-world file transfer tests, but it suffered from very poor write performance during the extended tests. The EXO averaged just 136 MB/s when we wrote 100GB of photos, movies, and documents to the drive. For reference, the much older Samsung T1 averaged 233 MB/s.

That means you shouldn't expect top-tier performance when you write large media files. The SanDisk Extreme Portable SSD and Samsung’s latest T-series external, the T5, are both better for that job, especially given their price. But, to be fair, Thunderbolt 3 devices are still the best for those use-cases if you have the money.

The Savage EXO performed within our expectations during application-focused tests. It trailed the SanDisk Extreme and Samsung T1 slightly during the PCMark 8 test, but performance was adequate. The Savage EXO also performed well during light, bursty workloads where the SLC buffer helps deliver a fairly speedy experience. These types of applications are representative of many common applications, like games, so the EXO is a good fit for both PC and console gamers. Its small size, edgy look, and competitive pricing are plenty attractive, too.

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