At a look
Knowledgeable’s Score
Execs
- Very quick, over-20Gbps USB connection
- Extraordinarily small kind issue
- 5-year guarantee
Cons
- Slows significantly throughout lengthy contiguous writes
- Considerably low TBW ranking
Our Verdict
When you’re in search of an excellent small, quick, and reasonably priced transportable SSD for on a regular basis gentle use, there’s nothing higher than the Adata Elite SE880. Video professionals ought to look elsewhere although as a consequence of gradual lengthy writes.
Worth When Reviewed
$79.99 for 500GB I $129.99 for 1TB
Greatest Costs In the present day: Adata Elite SE880 SSD
$99.99
Free
$129.99
Free
No exterior SSD we’ve seen can match Adata’s Elite SE880 for portability. Certainly, it’s extra the scale of a USB thumb drive than the bigger rectangle that describes most exterior SSDs. The SE880 can also be very quick at on a regular basis duties—aces with our smaller 48GB knowledge set and the artificial benchmarks.
This assessment is a part of our ongoing roundup of the perfect exterior drives. Go there for info on competing merchandise and the way we examined them.
Adata Elite SE880: Design, specs, and worth
Obtainable in 500GB and 1TB capacities ($79 and $129, respectively), the titanium grey and black SE880 measures a mere 2.55 inches lengthy, 1.38-inches vast, and simply 0.48-inches thick. It weighs only one.1 ounces and nearly disappears in your pocket. Adata ships the drive with each a Sort-C to Sort-C and a Sort-A to Sort-C cable to cowl each USB-connection situations.
The SE880 makes use of TLC NAND reminiscence and has a SuperSpeed 20Gbps interface, aka a USB 3.2 Gen 2×2 drive. Meaning it’s able to round 2GBps transfers when hooked up to the suitable 20Gbps port. 3.2 2×2 ports aren’t widespread, however USB4/Thunderbolt additionally helps 20Gbps in case you occur to have one these. This ought to be welcome information to Apple silicon customers (who’ve T4/USB4 ports), as they will get Thunderbolt-like efficiency at a considerably cheaper price level.
Adata warranties the Elite SE880 for 5 years, or 300 terabytes written (TBW) per 500GB of capability. That’s not an incredible TBW ranking, however few customers will ever even write that a lot knowledge. When you count on to, you’ll both have to spend extra for a distinct drive or take your possibilities.
Adata Elite SE880: Efficiency
Apart from our 450GB write check, the SE880 proved an distinctive performer, outpacing the wonderful WD Black P50 gaming SSD proven within the charts under. The SE880 managed properly over 2GBps studying and almost 1.9GBps writing on CrystalDiskMark 8. Word that the WD is a 2TB drive with extra cache to play with.
The T7 Protect is a 10Gbps USB drive, however we included it as an example the distinction between the 2 USB flavors. And, sadly, to additionally present gradual the Adata was with the 450GB write.
Word: Proper-click and choose “Open picture in New Tab” to view the graphs full dimension.
The place the Elite SE880 actually excelled was in our real-world 48GB switch exams. Word that these are new numbers for all three drives garnered on our PCIe 4 testbed.
The place the SE880 loses out huge time is in lengthy contiguous writes such because the 450GB picture file we check with. The thought behind this check is to indicate the place secondary cache runs out. That’s the 50GB mark with the SE880, the place the write pace dropped precipitously from round 900MBps to vacillate between roughly 135MBps to 425MBps. In different phrases, writing natively (the total three bits) to the TLC cells was a relatively gradual course of.
You may see the phenomenon under. It’s a quite early drop as such issues go. Once more, our check SE880 was 1TB, whereas the WD and Samsung have been each 2TB drives. Having 2TB signifies that fairly a bit extra NAND is out there to be used as secondary cache (MLC/TLC/QLC written as SLC).
For on a regular basis work and the typical person, the SE880’s efficiency is nice. But it surely’s not your best option in case you routinely write giant quantities of knowledge to your exterior storage.
Exterior USB drive exams presently make the most of Home windows 11 64-bit operating on an MSI MEG X570/AMD Ryzen 3700X combo with 4 16GB Kingston 2666MHz DDR4 modules, a Zotac (Nvidia) GT 710 1GB x2 PCIe graphics card, and an Asmedia ASM3242 USB 3.2×2 card. Copy exams make the most of an ImDisk RAM disk utilizing 58GB of the 64GB whole reminiscence.
Wonderful for the typical person
The Adata Elite SE880 is a heck of a cut price for the typical person, and, for a reality, it gained’t weigh you down or unduly burden your pockets. Execs writing giant quantities of knowledge repeatedly, nonetheless, ought to search for one thing with higher sustained write efficiency.
