Ada You Announce Its new SE920 external SSD, the company’s first with USB4 interfaceThe drive promises a sequential read speed of up to 4000 MB/s (using SLC cache and using USB4 Host), which makes it one of the fastest external storage devices designed for consumers in the industry. In fact, in terms of sequential reading speed, it will even outperform any external SSD with USB 3.x or Thunderbolt 3/4 interface.
Adata will provide different versions of SE920 series drives with different capacities, but at present the company keeps the details of the series confidential. Adata also didn’t talk about the architecture of its SE920 drive (which SSD controller it uses, how fast the write speed, etc.), although it stated that the SSD uses the company’s proprietary heat transfer technology to ensure proper cooling and consistent performance.
Aimed at The best external hard drives and solid state drives, Adata’s SE920 drive will become one of the fastest portable storage devices with Thunderbolt 3/4 and USB4 interfaces when it goes on the market later this year. This is not surprising, because most external storage devices with TB3 interface integrate the previous generation SSD with PCIe Gen3 interface, theoretically it is impossible to even saturate the TB3 bus (support up to 32.4 Gbps or 4.05 GB of non-video bandwidth) /s ).
In addition, since TB3 uses 8b/10b encoding with a fairly high overhead, its actual available bandwidth is about 25.92 Gbps or 3.24 GBps. In contrast, even entry-level drives with PCIe 4.0 x4 interfaces can easily reach a throughput of 4 GBps. At the same time, the 128b/132b encoding of USB4 ensures that the available bandwidth of the interface is quite close to the theoretical bandwidth, because this method has lower overhead.
Generally, a high-performance external SSD contains an M.2 drive with a PCIe / NVMe interface and a PCIe to USB bridge. If this is the case with SE920, the drive integrates an NVMe M.2 SSD, a PCIe to USB4 bridge, and a USB4 chip responsible for power supply support and connector orientation. At the same time, it is possible for Adata to develop its SE920 from scratch, rather than just reusing fast drives with PCIe interfaces.
Adata has not announced the pricing of its SE920 external SSD with USB4 interface, but we can assume that these drives will be premium products.
