The test system used in this review is equipped with an AMD Ryzen 9 7900x CPU, Gigabyte B650E AORUS Master motherboard, 32GB (16GB x 2) of Corsair Vengeance 5200MT/s DDR5 memory, Samsung 990 Pro 2TB SSD, GIGABYTE GeForce GTX 1060 WINDFORCE OC 6G graphics card and a Gigabyte GC-MAPLE RIDGE Thunderbolt 4 add-in card. For the operating system, I used the latest version of Windows 11.
To test the performance of ADATA's SE920 external SSD, I ran a series of benchmarks using CrystalDiskMark, ATTO Disk Benchmark, AS SSD, HD Tune Pro, Anvil's Storage Utilities, Iometer and PCMark. For comparison, I've also included test results from the ADATA LEGEND 970, Crucial T700, Solidigm P44 Pro, Samsung 990 PRO, ADATA LEGEND 960, Crucial P3 Plus, SK hynix Platinum P41, Silicon Power XS70, WD_BLACK SN770, ADATA XPG ATOM 50, ADATA XPG GAMMIX S70 Blade, Crucial P5 Plus, Plextor M10PY, ADATA XPG GAMMIX S70, Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus, WD_BLACK SN850, Silicon Power US70, ADATA XPG GAMMIX S50 Lite, Crucial X10 Pro, Crucial X9 Pro, ADATA Elite SE880, Kingston XS2000, ADATA XPG ATOM 30, Samsung 980, Silicon-Power UD70, Crucial P2, SK hynix Gold P31 and Crucial P5.
Looking at the screenshot above, you can see that the SE920 performs equally well with both incompressible (0%) and compressible (100%) data.
CrystalDiskMark 8.0.4:
First, I ran a few quick tests using CrystalDiskMark. This benchmark measures the performance of a storage device by testing its sequential and random read and write speeds. For this test, we're using the peak and real world profiles.
According to ADATA, the SE920 is capable of reading at 3,800 MB/s and writing at 3,700 MB/s when plugged into a USB4 40Gbps port. While that may be the case with the 2TB model, the 1TB drive came up short of these numbers in CrystalDiskMark's sequential read and write tests.
As you'd expect, the SE920 wasn't as fast when tested with the "real world" profile which uses a single thread and a much lower queue depth. Nevertheless, it was still able to read at 2,772 MB/s and write at more than 2,677 MB/s.
ATTO Disk Benchmark 4.01:
I also used ATTO Disk Benchmark to test the SE920's sequential read and write speeds. The tests are run using blocks ranging in size from 512B to 64 MB and the total length set to 256MB.
 ADATA SE920 1TB |
 Crucial X10 Pro 2TB |
When tested with ATTO, the SE920's read speeds topped out at about 2.90 GB/s and its write speeds at 2.74 GB/s.
