ADATA SE770G SSD
Striking appearance and excellent value
Attach the drive to a USB port and the black side generates a spectacular light show
£99.68 (512GB)/£133.67 (1TB) FROM Adata, adata.com/uk FEATURES 512GB/1TB, RGB lighting panel, USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type C (USB-C to USB-C and USB-C to USB-A cable included); 99.5x57.5x18mm, 136g
The ADATA SE770G provides portable, high-speed external storage, but with a rather surprising and colourful twist…
Once you attach the SE770G to a USB port, using either the USB-A or USB-C cables, the rather plain black side immediately generates a spectacular light show. The central part of the top is backlit with RGB LEDs through a stencil of hexagon and diamond tessellation, and colour cycles through a rainbow of rich colours. Unfortunately, though, you can’t control the colours nor the speed of cycling.
The drive is roughly rectangular, with filleted corners and chamfered sides, being shiny black on the top side and silver on the underside. The silver side is made of metal and slotted to dissipate heat.
The USB port on the drive is Type-C, and the two included cables are around 20cm long, making them fine for laptop users but decidedly short for desktop computers.
Double performance
ADATA are typically coy about what hardware is inside their SSDs; whatever is inside though, it performs well enough to be comparable with most USB 3.2 Gen 2 specification drives in the market today.
In our benchmarking, CrystalDiskMark 7.0 recorded 954MBps reads, and 898MBps writes, and the AJA System test these translated into 857MBps reads and 862MBps writes. Many NVMe drives start a file transfer quickly then drop down to around 700Mb/s once the internal cache is saturated. But at the lower speeds this drive runs, the cache would last much longer before becoming saturated, and therefore it is unlikely that it would slow significantly.
The LED effects on this drive are just a bit of a gimmick really. At the very least, there could have been a different colour cycle for when the drive is being read or written to.
But ignoring the light show, the SE770G delivers a decent capacity choice and good performance for those with a Gen 2 specification port, at a price that some
Gen 1 drives don’t match. And, that point is critical. Because this is the drive that someone who only has Gen 1 ports now, but expects to get Gen 2 ports soon should consider. While the SE770G doesn’t cost any more than most Gen 1 drives, it offers double the performance when used with a Gen 2 port.
The price premium for Gen 2 performance usually makes it pointless for those with the older Gen 1 ports to consider, but the SE770G is a much more affordable option and allows for some degree of future-proofing. The 512GB model retails at £100 but the 1TB model is £134, making the larger capacity model the best value of the two.
The design also contradicts the expectation that cheaper storage isn’t well constructed, as the drive feels substantial and robust. For most users with a games console or laptop to backup, the SE770G is a great, eye-catching device. Mark Pickavance