ADATA SE800

amazon ADATA SE800 reviews

The ADATA SE800 external SSD is everything you want in a pocket SSD: sleek, durable, affordable, and versatile. It will make a great addition to your kit.

The ADATA SE800 isn’t the cheapest external SSD you can buy — its list price of $259.99 for the 1TB unit seen here comes to 26 cents per gigabyte. Otherwise, the SE800 is practically indestructible: It’s a solid SSD with an Ingress Protection rating. IP68 rating has been certified to be both dustproof and waterproof to a depth of 5 feet for up to 30 minutes. It’s also very fast, extremely sleek, and compact (1.4 ounces, measuring 0.4 x 2.8 x 1.7 inches). ADATA includes the bells and whistles that any drive reviewer should expect to see when testing out a new storage device, including dual USB cables for USB-C and USB-C needs- Your A is fulfilled without resorting to an easy-to-lose adapter. It’s the editor’s easy choice among hard drives.

An almost perfect peripheral

The SE800’s brushed aluminum housing, in blue or black, houses one M.2 Type-2242 SSD, formatted as exFAT by default. (The drive is reformatted easily and is compatible with Windows, Mac, Android, Linux, Xbox One, and PS4 devices.) The rubber tips protect the device from dust and water; you need to remove the end with the card to show the USB-C port and the LED working.

When the drive is not in use, reinstall the rubber tip to ensure that the drive is always splash-proof. That can be more complicated than it sounds, so make sure to double-check that the end of the drive is completely flat with the edges of the drive if you’re taking it out in the field.

With rubber tips in place, ADATA is a MIL-STD 810G device that can withstand four-meter drops. (And why not? Apart from the internal shock resistance, the hard drive is virtually weightless and has no moving parts.) As for water resistance, I dropped it in a jar and left it in minutes, with no ill effects.

The IP68 rating means the SE800 is sturdier than the nice-looking but slightly more expensive CalDigit Tuff Nano. We’ve never seen an SSD with a single higher rating for consumer electronics waterproofing — IPx9 can withstand high-pressure cleaning or steam jets — so ADATA has achieved the highest durability rating you can find in a consumer product.

The drive comes with a three-year warranty and a quick start guide with contact information for support or questions and instructions for downloading two helpful utilities: OStoGo, which enable you to boot your operating system from the drive and HDDtoGo. This suite includes backup and encryption utilities.

Speed for backup

Okay, the SE800 has no excess speed — after all, when it comes to data transfers, there’s no such thing as too much performance. But it’s very fast. We’ve subjected the SSD to a series of benchmarks designed to power the drive and mimic real-world computing tasks. The SE800 passed, scoring well in most of our tests.

You’ll notice one thing: All of these drives support the USB 3.1 Gen 2 interface, but only in some cases use the PCI Express internals (drive, controller, and bridging silicon) allows for faster speeds than previous conventional external SSDs on SATA drives, controllers, and bridges. Second-origin (SATA) drives will typically see sequential reads and writes at speeds ranging from 450MB to 550MB per second. When comparing drives with internal PCI Express and SATA, you’ll see this, especially in the Crystal DiskMark tests.

Blackmagic 3.1 Disk Speed Test

The Mac-only BlackMagic drive test utility was created by an Australian video hardware and software manufacturer and is commonly used to help videographers evaluate drive performance when working with large video files. ADATA had slightly slower read speeds in this test than the Tuff Nano, Crucial X8, and SanDisk Extreme Pro. However, its write speed is very competitive.

Drag and drop test

We copy a 1.2GB test folder containing several different file types from our tested PC to an external drive. This test provides a good practical check of the baud rate. The ADATA SE800 performs like a champ, matching the SanDisk SSD’s time of 2 seconds.

CalDigit’s Tuff Nano took 3.4 seconds to switch folders, while HyperX Savage EXO needed a leisurely 4 seconds.

PCMark 8

The PCMark 8 storage sub-test measures the drive’s performance under typical video conferencing and word processing workloads. The SE800 is up in the last place; the five scores are close, that the difference between the ADATA and the Crucial X8 with the top score ends.

Crystal DiskMark

Crystal DiskMark’s sequential read/write tests measure a drive’s performance by reading and writing contiguous large data blocks. Here, the ADATA SE800’s read score of 957MBps is the highest, on par with Crucial’s SSD and close to the advertised peak of 1,000MBps.

The SE800 also failed to do well on the Crystal DiskMark write test, clocking in at 676MBps. Other drives, except HyperX, beat that result manually.

We have a winner

ADATA’s SE800 External SSD is a definite winner. The only negative we could find with this drive is that the supplied cable is rather short; This is usually not an issue when working with laptops, but it can be an inconvenience if you want to use it with a tower PC. Otherwise, this is a great SSD. With a three-year warranty, dual USB cables, and downloadable utility software, it makes for a compelling purchase. It even boasts active lights, a feature often overlooked by weight and cost-conscious manufacturers. Add to that its speed, affordability, and compact size, and it’s hard to complain.

Advantages

Small, light, and fast.

Has high durability.

Reasonable cost per gigabyte.

USB-C and USB-A cables included.

Disadvantage

The provided cables are quite short.

where can you get a ADATA SE800 online

ADATA SE800 1TB IP68 Rugged – Up to 1000 MB/s- SuperSpeed USB 3.2 Gen 2 USB-C External Portable SSD Black (ASE800-1TU32G2-CBK): Buy it now

ADATA SE800 512GB External SSD: Buy it now