Adata Elite SE880 portable SSD review: Fast, affordable, and tiny

At a look

Knowledgeable’s Score

Professionals

Very quick, over-20Gbps USB connection
Extraordinarily small type issue
5-year guarantee

Cons

Slows significantly throughout lengthy contiguous writes
Considerably low TBW ranking

Our Verdict

For those who’re in search of a brilliant small, quick, and reasonably priced transportable SSD for on a regular basis mild use, there’s nothing higher than the Adata Elite SE880. Video execs ought to look elsewhere although on account of sluggish lengthy writes.

Worth When Reviewed

$79.99 for 500GB I $129.99 for 1TB

Greatest Costs At the moment: 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 most effective exterior drives. Go there for info on competing merchandise and the way we examined them.

Adata Elite SE880: Design, specs, and worth

Out there 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 large, and simply 0.48-inches thick. It weighs just 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.

Adata’s Elite SE880 is a superb, super-portable exterior SSD for on a regular basis use. It’s not, nevertheless, for execs writing giant chunks of information repeatedly.

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 connected 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 must 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 a tremendous TBW ranking, however few customers will ever even write that a lot knowledge. For those who count on to, you’ll both have to spend extra for a distinct drive or take your possibilities.

Adata Elite SE880: Efficiency

Except for our 450GB write take a look at, the SE880 proved an distinctive performer, outpacing the superb WD Black P50 gaming SSD proven within the charts under. The SE880 managed effectively over 2GBps studying and practically 1.9GBps writing on CrystalDiskMark 8. Be aware 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 for example the distinction between the 2 USB flavors. And, sadly, to additionally present sluggish the Adata was with the 450GB write.

Be aware: Proper-click and choose “Open picture in New Tab” to view the graphs full measurement.

Adata’s Elite SE880 confirmed its mettle in CrystalDiskMark 8. Larger numbers (MBps) are higher.

The place the Elite SE880 actually excelled was in our real-world 48GB switch assessments. Be aware that these are new numbers for all three drives garnered on our PCIe 4 testbed.

The Adata Elite SE880 just about aced our 48GB transfers. It beat the more-than-respectable WD Black P50 by a formidable 53 seconds total. Shorter bars (seconds) are higher.

The place the SE880 loses out massive time is in lengthy contiguous writes such because the 450GB picture file we take a look at with. The thought behind this take a look at is to indicate the place secondary cache runs out. That’s the 50GB mark with the SE880, the place the write velocity dropped precipitously from round 900MBps to vacillate between roughly 135MBps to 425MBps. In different phrases, writing natively (the complete three bits) to the TLC cells was a relatively sluggish course of.

This isn’t the take a look at the place you desire a longer bar. The SE880 was extraordinarily sluggish writing our 450GB picture file. This isn’t the drive for that form of process. Shorter bars (seconds) are higher.

You’ll be able to see the phenomenon under. It’s a reasonably early drop as such issues go. Once more, our take a look at SE880 was 1TB, whereas the WD and Samsung have been each 2TB drives. Having 2TB signifies that fairly a bit extra NAND is obtainable to be used as secondary cache (MLC/TLC/QLC written as SLC).

The velocity proven is 315MBps on this seize, however these valleys are as little as 125MBps.

For on a regular basis work and the common consumer, the SE880’s efficiency is nice. However it’s not the only option in case you routinely write giant quantities of information to your exterior storage.

Exterior USB drive assessments at the moment 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 assessments make the most of an ImDisk RAM disk utilizing 58GB of the 64GB complete reminiscence.

Wonderful for the common consumer

The Adata Elite SE880 is a heck of a cut price for the common consumer, and, for a reality, it received’t weigh you down or unduly burden your pockets. Professionals writing giant quantities of information repeatedly, nevertheless, ought to search for one thing with higher sustained write efficiency.

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