If you’re working on the GO or you just need a detachable drive to store your important files you’d surely noticed that portable SSDs have entered the market for quite a while now.
If you’re in need for an external drive, on the market there are different options to choose. The most common and convenient ones at the moment are external HDDs and SSDs.
Specifically we’re talking about power efficient bus powered external SATA SSDs like the HyperX Savage EXO SSD we have today in our office.
| Interface | USB 3.1 Gen 2 Type C |
| Capacity | 480GB, 960GB |
| NAND | 3D TLC |
| Power Consumption | 5v 900mA |
| Dimensions | 123,82mm x 48,61mm x 10,24mm |
| Life expectancy | 1 million hours MTBF |
| Weight | 56g |
| Operating Temperature | da 0°C a 70°C |
INTRODUCTION
Kingston is well known for internal SSDs and Thumbdrives based on 3D TLC flash and with the HyperX Savage EXO enters the external SSD market aiming at gaming and content production with large capacities and speeds of up to 500 MBps reads / 480 MBps writes, and a 20% reduction in game load times when used with leading game consoles. But is it really necessary? Can’t it be replaced instead by a standard external HDD? We’ll try to address this question for you in the following article.
UNBOXING AND FIRST LOOK
The HyperX Savage Exo SSD Drive is shipped in a red and white box with a plastic blister on the inside containing the SSD, USB Type C to A and USB Type C to C cables.
The Hyper X Savage EXO external SSD is a classy and elegant device with no screws holding the structure together. It’s very small On the inside (124mm x 49mm x 10mm) and weights 56g. The drive is composed by a M2 SATA SSD (M.2 2280 SATA SSD) and a USB 3.1 Gen 2.0 TYPE C interface (ASMedia’s ASM235CM). This setup ensures optimal thermals as our test will confirm it.
TESTING
In order to test the modules we used the following applications: ATTO Disk Benchmark, DiskMark and Aja System Test.
For detailed test results refer to the images below.
Analyzing the tests we can clearly see that the firmware update has brought improvements in read and write speeds. The drive was also pretty cool even alter long period use with a max temperature of 55 C, even after 150GB of non stop traffic.
With Aja System Test we measured the consistency in write and read for an 8gb write read test. We can clearly see that the write speed drops to 250Mb/s after roughly 2,5Gb but the writing speed stay consistent around 500 Mb/s during the whole run.
CONCLUSIONS
Our advice if you’re considering to buy an external drive is to think about what you’re buying it for:
- If you’re buying a portable drive to work on the go we highly recommend to buy a portable SSD. Your DATA will be safer than in HDDs and you’ll also benefit from the faster read and write speeds. SSD’s are practically shock proof and you can use them to work directly on your files without importing them on your PC.
- On the other hand if you need detachable high capacity drives maybe to secure physically important files we recommend buying an HDD. The more high you go with internal space the more convenient it gets to buy an HDD. By the way you have to consider that any accidental shock could kill your drive or cause irreparable damage and file loss.
If you’re interested in buying the HyperX Savage EXO External SSD :
https://www.hyperxgaming.com/en/storage/savage-exo-ssd#specifications
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