Adata SE760

The wobbly SE760 certainly isn’t awful, but you can get a lot more elsewhere for the same money

SCORE

PRICE 1TB, £102 (£122 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/324se7

READ SPEED 980MB/ SEC

WRITE SPEED 787MB/ SEC

From its size and shape, we strongly suspect that the Adata SE760 is a standard M.2 SSD wrapped up in a USB enclosure. There’s nothing wrong with that – using commodity parts evidently helps keep the price down, as this is one of the most economical SSDs around, working out to 13p per gigabyte.

It doesn’t win any points for style, however. The plain-looking case comes in a choice of two drab colours – black and grey – and its curved design means it wobbles on your desk as you type. We appreciate the inclusion of an activity LED, a convenience that most manufacturers seem to have abandoned; irritatingly, though, it’s stuck on the end, next to the USB-C connector, meaning that you can only see it from certain angles.

In our performance tests the SE760 delivered strong sequential read speeds, getting close to the limits of its 10Gbits/sec USB connection. But write speeds were lower and the drive’s results in the PCMark storage benchmarks were unexpectedly mediocre; we suspect this is down to cooling issues because we noticed that the drive became quite hot during the tests.

Adata helpfully includes two USB cables in the box, meaning you can connect the SE760 to either a USB-A or USB-C socket, but there’s nothing in the way of extra software, nor any support for hardware encryption. In all it feels like a rather barebones offering: this isn’t a terrible SSD, but it’s hard to think of a reason why you would choose it over a similarly priced rival such as the SanDisk Extreme.