Adata SE900G

The SE900G is no shrinking violet and its performance lives up to the colourful bluster

SCORE

PRICE 500GB, £63 (£75 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/324se9

READ SPEED 1,869MB/ SEC

WRITE SPEED 1,756MB/ SEC

If Adata’s SE760 is a little on the plain side, the SE900G goes to the opposite extreme. Plug it in and the top is immediately illuminated with a glowing rainbow mesh pattern. The colours pulse continuously while the drive is connected, and can’t be customised or disabled – so here’s hoping you like the effect.

Another thing distinctive about this drive is its support for USB 3.2 Gen 2x2.

Plug it into a compatible PC and you’re looking at double the bandwidth of most competing drives: we saw fantastic sequential read and write speeds approaching 2GB/sec.

Better yet, the drive manages to maintain best-in-class speeds under demanding random-access workloads. In the multithreaded AS SSD benchmark, data flooded out of the SE900G at a very impressive rate of 613MB/sec, while PCMark 10 awarded it a superlative score of 2,017 in the data disk test.

As with the SE760, you get little in the way of trimmings. There’s no encryption support and no bundled software – just a pair of cables allowing you to connect the drive to both new and old-style USB ports.

There’s a price to pay for that cuttingedge interface, too. Whether you go for this 512GB model or the 1TB option, the SE900G works out to a stiff 16p/GB. Still, that’s comfortably less than the other 20Gbits/sec drive on test this month, the SanDisk Extreme Pro, so if you’re looking for an ultrafast external SSD, the Adata could be the ideal choice – as long as you can live with the insistently colourful design.