Today, the company is launching the SanDisk Extreme Portable SSD v2 (along with the Extreme PRO Portable SSD v2). Western Digital brought NVMe support to their My Passport SSD product line last month. In 2020, we have seen the market move en-masse to NVMe SSDs behind a USB 3.2 Gen 2 bridge for this market segment.
Traditional SATA SSDs (saturating at 560 MBps) can hardly take full advantage of the bandwidth offered by USB 3.2 Gen 2. High-performance external storage devices use either Thunderbolt 3 or USB 3.2 Gen 2 for the host interface.
This review discusses the performance and characteristics of Western Digital's latest offerings (2020 catalog) supporting USB 3.1 Gen 2 (10 Gbps) speeds. While those speeds can be achieved with Thunderbolt 3, mass-market devices have to rely on USB. Thanks to rapid advancements in flash technology (including the advent of 3D NAND and NVMe) as well as faster host interfaces (such as Thunderbolt 3 and USB 3.x), we now have palm-sized flash-based storage devices capable of delivering 2GBps+ speeds.
External bus-powered storage devices have grown both in storage capacity as well as speeds over the last decade.
