Adata SV620 240GB An SSD that thinks outside the box

Affordable external SSD

Installing an SSD (solid-state drive) inside your PC, and making it the drive Windows starts up from, is a very effective way to reduce loading times for games and software, andd make your system feel faster in dailyy use. But if you don’t fancy undertaking an internal upgrade, the USB 3.0 (and faster) ports found on all recent desktop PCS and laptopsops let you take advantagetage of SSD speeds with external storage, and it needn’t even be expensive. pensive.

This 240GBGB drive is cheap, and looksooks it, with a basic texturedured plastic case. Inside, however, is an SSD chassisssis much like the oness sold as internal SATATA drives (see page 22), and withth no moving parts it should be hard to damage. Adata claims read and write speeds of over 400Mbit/s, but we weren’t surprised about getting results just shy of 300Mbit/s, falling to 148Mbit/s write and 227Mbit/s read with smaller fifiles. It fell further to 27M27mbit/s in the cha ll en gin challenging randomaccess access tests.

These are exexpected and acceptable spespeeds even for an internal SSD, so plugging in a drdrive rather than opening uup your PC is definitely a viviable option. It also means you could use the SV620 to share data betbetween a desktop PC and a laptop, for example, bbecause it’s small and lighlight enough to slip in a bag, and doesn’t require a mains power supply. Per gigabyte, it’s expensive compared with a traditional hard drive, but not unreasonably so. A 480GB model, at £113, works out cheaper per gigabyte.