This October Prime Day's got me all kinds of messed up. Just when I think I know what the market's doing, it goes and throws me a curveball, just like this Adata SE880 1 TB external SSD which is currently on sale at Amazon for $70 (save $20).
I've been testing portable SSDs for a while, now—including the SE880—and I didn't expect a genuinely respectable current-gen drive like this one to be going for as cheap as a previous-gen one. It's also the cheapest this drive has been all year on Amazon.
USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 drives cap out at about 2,000 MB/s, and while most don't quite reach that high, they get close. If you have a Gen 2x2 port, you'll have a much better time of it if you get such a drive, because previous-gen (3.2 Gen 2) drives such as the Crucial X9 cap out at about 1,000 MB/s.
Speaking of the X9, though, notice that it costs $73 at Amazon right now—and that's on offer. The X6 is a little better at $68, but that caps out at 800 MB/s. In fact, pretty much across the board, 1,000 MB/s drives aren't going for much cheaper than the SE880 right now. In other words, double the speed and approximately the same $0.07 cost per GB of capacity.
All of this is by-the-by if you don't have a Gen 2x2 port, but I'm betting a fair number of you do. After all, pretty much any current-gen motherboard should have just such a port, and so will many previous-gen ones. Even my Intel 12th Gen's motherboard (the Gigabyte Z690 UD DDR4) has one. They're not as uncommon as you might think. (USB 4, however, is a different story.)
All of this is to say that there should be a bunch of people out there who will benefit from a 3.2 Gen 2x2 drive. In which case, the SE880 is a cracking choice right now with this discount.
In my testing (the charts for which you can see on my TeamGroup PD20 review) I found it to offer decent sequential transfer speeds of about 1,700 MB/s for almost a minute straight. In other words, you should achieve close to 100 GB of data transferred in just under a minute before speeds drop. That should cover most use cases, don't you think?
Yes, there are faster drives, and more consistent ones, too. But are any of those as cheap as previous-gen drives? Not quite. And for that reason, I'd be eyeing up this SE880 deal if I was looking for some cheap external storage with current-gen speeds right now.
