Glyph Atom EX40 evaluation: Rugged, moveable 40Gbps USB4 storage

I used to be impressed with the Glyph Atom EX40 from the minute I took it out of the field. It’s a looker, and its random and real-world efficiency have been top-notch. Alas, it ain’t low cost, although with the present excessive worth of NAND it’s trying nearly like a cut price.

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

What are the Glyph Atom EX40’s options?

The black and darkish grey, aluminum-bodied Atom EX40 measures round 4.5-inches lengthy, however 2.8-inches extensive, by 0.8-inches thick. Weight is about 10 ounces. It’s no light-weight, however I personally like a little bit of heft to my gear — the texture of high quality and all that.

The Atom EX40 is a 40Gbps USB4 SSD, because the label subsequent to the Sort-C port clearly spells out (see the picture under). Glyph bundles a 7-inch (together with the connectors) Sort-C to Sort-C cable, and fortunately, I had no points with it as I did with the Atom EX20’s.

The Atom EX40 carries a three-year guarantee, and two of these years embrace free knowledge restoration — very uncommon for a boutique storage vendor.

There’s no acknowledged TBW ranking (terabytes which may be written below guarantee) for the EX40, however 600TBW is the business norm. The probabilities of the typical end-user writing even that a lot knowledge inside a decade are slim to none. Videographers, possibly.

How a lot does the Glyph Atom EX40 value?

Grasp onto your hats, of us, it’s a wild monetary journey to proudly owning an SSD today. Two months in the past, the EX40 would’ve regarded expensive certainly. Now? $390 for 1TB, $500 for 2TB, $850 for 4TB, and $1,700 for 8TB don’t look half dangerous.

With NAND/SSD costs so excessive, the value delta between the varied bus speeds has change into far much less vital. In different phrases, if you happen to’re going to spend massively for an SSD, you would possibly need to get the quickest stuff out there.

That stated, 80Gbps SSDs, whereas benchmarking a lot sooner, don’t fairly ship the true world efficiency bounce that you just get with 20Gbps over 10Gbps, or 40Gbps over 20Gbps.

How briskly is the Glyph Atom EX40?

The Atom EX40’s efficiency is great. In case you learn my evaluation of the 20Gbps Atom EX20, you understand that I had points with the included cable. The EX40 shipped with what regarded like an an identical cable, however had no points. Go determine. Firmware? Handshaking?

The Atom EX40, whereas not excellent in CrystalDiskMark 8’s sequential checks, turned in very spectacular 4K and real-world switch instances. Because of the latter, it ranked because the quickest pre-populated 40Gbps total that I’ve examined.

The EX40 was slower than solely the TerraMaster D1 enclosure with a Corsair MP700 Professional put in, and the Ugreen CM850 enclosure, during which I put in an equally quick WD SN850X.

Observe that once I consult with a product as an enclosure, it means it ships unpopulated, with no drive inside.

Whereas it wasn’t nice below CrystalDiskMark 8 with sequential transfers, the Atom EX40 turned in some stellar CDM 8 4K numbers.

Right here you’ll be able to see among the aforementioned good leads to real-world transfers. The Atom EX40 wasn’t quickest in each 48GB switch, nevertheless it was in some, and positively within the hunt through the others.

A really quick 450GB write time utilizing FastCopy is what actually propelled the Atom EX40 to its excessive placement within the total rankings.

In whole, I’m certain you’ll be happy with the Atom EX40’s efficiency. It additionally sheds warmth effectively below load, regardless of the silicone jacket.

Do you have to purchase the Glyph Atom EX40?

The reply to this query can be sure if you happen to can afford it or any SSD at this level. Rolling your individual with an enclosure was cheaper on the time of this writing, however naked NVMe SSD costs are rising quickly in order that will not be the cheaper possibility for lengthy.

Worth apart, the Glyph Atom EX40 is good-looking, rugged, and quick. You gained’t be dissatisfied.

How we take a look at

Drive checks at the moment 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 whole).

Each 20Gbps USB and Thunderbolt 5 are built-in into the motherboard and Intel CPU/GPU graphics are used. Inner 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 system’s potential efficiency. Then we run a sequence of 48GB switch and 450GB write checks utilizing Home windows Explorer drag and drop to indicate what customers will see throughout routine copy operations, in addition to the far speedier 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 checks. Previously the 48GB checks have been completed with a RAM disk serving that function.

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 could lower resulting from much less NAND for secondary caching, in addition to different elements. This subject has abated considerably with the present crop of SSDs using extra mature controllers and much sooner, late-generation NAND.