Introduction

ADATA is Taiwan’s largest manufacturer of flash storage and DRAM memory for computers. They have been at the forefront of SSD development for many years, bringing us renowned SSDs such as the SX8200, SX900 and S510.

Today, we’re reviewing the ADATA Elite SE880 Portable SSD in the 1 TB variant. The SE880 utilizes the blazing fast USB 3.2 Gen 2×2 20 Gbps interface, which doubles the bandwidth over USB 3.2 Gen 2×1, aka USB 3.1 Gen 2. Many portable SSDs using USB 3.2 Gen 2×1 were bottlenecked by the USB interface speed, so it makes sense to increase the interface transfer rate by another notch. We previously reviewed various external portable SSDs from ADATA—the SE880 is the first based on a single-chip solution. Traditionally, a portable SSD consists of a standard SSD controller that uses either SATA or NVMe as the interface, paired with a bridge chip that translates the USB protocol into whatever interface the controller speaks. Obviously requiring two components increases complexity, size, cost, and nowadays, supply chain logistics can be an issue too. The SE880 Portable SSD uses the new Silicon Motion SM2320G controller, combining the company’s SSD controller IP with an integrated USB interface, making it much simpler to build high-performance portable storage devices.

There’s not a lot of motherboards with USB 3.2 2×2 20 Gbps support out there. Especially on AMD AM4 the situation is complicated, I know of only six AM4 boards with USB 3.2 2×2, out of approximately 250. For Intel LGA1700 platform, the situation is better, out of 180 motherboards around 80 support the fastest USB interface. For the upcoming Socket AM5 however, I suspect that a lot of boards will have USB 3.2 2×2.

This review covers the 1 TB version of the ADATA Elite SE880, which is the largest capacity available, there’s also a 512 GB version.