Glyph Atom EX20 SSD evaluate: Quick 20Gbps USB (in the event you BYO cable)

Greatest Costs In the present day: Glyph Atom EX20 20Gbps SSD

This boutique USB SSD from Glyph is among the extra spectacular to roll via our lab just lately. When it comes to design and efficiency, that’s a great factor — however the value can also be impressively excessive. That’s greater than seemingly because of the ongoing rise in NAND costs, which is affecting your entire storage business, along with others.

Learn on to study extra, then see our roundup of the most effective exterior drives for comparability.

What are the Glyph Atom EX20’s options?

The Atom EX20 is an exceptionally handsome, USB 3.2×2 (20Gbps) exterior SSD from Glyph. It’s all black and clad in a silicone jacket that’s ribbed in a tread sample to supply a really certain grip.

At 7.5 ounces (jacket included), the Atom EX20 is hardly the lightest exterior SSD I’ve examined, however the heft additionally provides you a way of high quality. It measures, jacket included, roughly 4.4-inches lengthy, by 2.4-inches huge, by a little bit underneath an inch thick. Each the Sort-C port and exercise mild are on the identical finish of the unit, with the port offset to the left.

The Atom EX20 is warrantied for 3 years with two of information restoration and one 12 months of alternative. There’s no TeraBytes Written (TBW) ranking, however determine round 600TBW, which is an entire lot of information. Bear in mind, reads don’t depend, solely writes.

How a lot is the Glyph Atom EX20?

SSD costs have risen fairly a bit just lately, however I used to be nonetheless a bit stunned on the Atom EX20’s quite steep pricing for a 20Gbps SSD: $310 for 1TB, $420 for 2TB, $700 for 4TB, and $1,500 for 8TB. And people costs we listing are reductions, as proven beneath.

Principally, these costs are extra in keeping with sooner 40Gbps USB4, than 20Gbps USB 3.2×2. With that in thoughts, the 40Gbps and solely barely pricier Glyph Atom EX40 (see the upcoming evaluate) is the higher deal.

Observe that the 40Gbps model of the OWC 1M2 enclosure is presently solely $90 and might be married with an NVMe SSD for lower than $300. You may additionally wait six months to see if the entire AI/knowledge heart bubble bursts and SSD costs drop.

Glyph Atom EX20 efficiency caveats

Utilizing the bundled 7-inch Sort-C cable brought on points on our Home windows take a look at mattress, with the EX20 initially writing at solely 50- to 80MBps, and writing at solely 20MBps on an M4 Mac. For no matter motive, learn efficiency was over 2GBps, so the cable challenge is a very vexing conundrum.

In order for you the most effective, least problematic Sort-C cable, use a Thunderbolt cable — they’re fully appropriate with USB and manufactured to tight tolerances. Certainly, utilizing one solved the Atom EX20’s write efficiency challenge.

This isn’t the primary time I’ve used a bundled cable that didn’t enable full efficiency — the TerraMaster D1 SSD Professional had the identical challenge, albeit it was an 80Gbps cable that throttled to 20Gbps.

Observe additionally, that as with all USB 3.2×2 SSDs, the Atom EX20 will fall again to 10Gbps and not using a devoted 20Gbps port. It’s because most techniques with out one don’t help the protocol, however do help the 10Gbps USB 3.2 Gen 2 commonplace.

How briskly is the Glyph Atom EX20?

As soon as I switched cables, the 4TB Atom EX20 turned in a blistering efficiency. One which garnered it the number-two spot amongst all 20Gbps SSDs. The one drive to beat it was the Asus TUF Gaming A2, which is definitely an unpopulated enclosure that I crammed with an especially quick Samsung 9100 Professional.

That was not significantly honest of us. So due to that, think about the EX20 the highest canine in pre-populated 20Gbps USB. That’s borne out by the drive’s CrystalDiskMark 8 numbers proven beneath.

The Glyph Atom EX20 once more competed properly with its rivals (Corsair EX400U, Essential X10) within the CrystalDiskMark 4K exams.

The Atom EX20 was aggressive in our real-world 48GB transfers, although it didn’t present as a lot potential within the FastCopy exams because the Essential X10.

Being a 4TB SSD actually helped the Atom EX20 in our 450GB write take a look at (the others are 2TB). It had loads of secondary cache to play with and by no means slowed considerably.

I’ve no complaints in regards to the Atom EX20’s efficiency — it’s a really quick 20Gbps USB SSD.

Must you purchase the Glyph Atom EX20?

In mild of my expertise with the cable and the value, the purchase advice is… maybe. If value is not any concern, make {that a} sure. Put one other means, the design and efficiency are wonderful (cable excepted), however for the time being, it’s very costly, as many boutique vendor SSDs are.

Observe that Glyph is wanting into the cable challenge, and can seemingly repair it by the point you learn this. That stated, take a look at yours very first thing utilizing CrystalDiskMark 8 or one other artificial benchmark to verify.

How we take a look at

Drive exams presently make the most of Home windows 11 24H2, 64-bit working off of a PCIe 4.0 Samsung 990 Professional in an Asus Z890-Creator WiFi (PCIe 4.0/5.0) motherboard. The CPU is a Core Extremely i5 225 feeding/fed by two Essential 64GB DDR5 5600MHz modules (128GB of reminiscence complete).

Each 20Gbps USB and Thunderbolt 5 are built-in into the motherboard and Intel CPU/GPU graphics are used. Inside PCIe 5.0 SSDs concerned in testing are mounted in an Asus Hyper M.2 x16 Gen5 adapter card sitting in a PCIe 5.0 slot.

We run the CrystalDiskMark 8.04 (and 9), AS SSD 2, and ATTO 4 artificial benchmarks (to maintain article size down, we report solely the primary) to search out the storage gadget’s potential efficiency. Then we run a collection of 48GB switch and 450GB write exams utilizing Home windows Explorer drag and drop to indicate what customers will see throughout routine copy operations, in addition to the far sooner FastCopy run as administrator to indicate what’s attainable.

A 25GBps two-SSD RAID 0 array on the aforementioned Asus Hyper M.2 x16 Gen5 is used because the second drive in our switch exams. Previously the 48GB exams had been finished with a RAM disk serving that goal.

Every take a look at is carried out on a NTFS-formatted and newly TRIM’d drive so the outcomes are optimum. Observe that in regular use, as a drive fills up, efficiency might lower attributable to much less NAND for secondary caching, in addition to different elements. This challenge has abated considerably with the present crop of SSDs using extra mature controllers and much sooner, late-generation NAND.