ADATA ELITE SE880 1TB Review

General Impressions

The SE880 ELITE is a premium drive that’s clearly geared towards professionals and others who need high speed volume storage. This speaks directly to its performance, form factor and connection method. While we’ve had the USB 3.2 x2 20Gbps spec for years on end, it has taken a while for the market to get saturated with such drives. For the most part, drives are confined to the 10Gbpps standard of USB 3.2 and it makes sense as that’s the most ubiquitous speed and connection method on computers.

As such, the SE8800 utilizing the 20GBps standard essentially confines itself to the newer, more premium devices and computers. To warrant this connection method, ADATA claims the SE880 ELITE can read and write at up to 2GB/s which is of course the theoretical limit for the interface anyway. Previous high performance ADATA drives I used, were desktop M.2 SSDs in a smaller than normal drive enclosure. This time, the size of the drive makes this impractical, so ADATA is clearly using dedicated components for this drive and its variations.

While the previous SE800 drive was waterproof with an IP68 certification, this newer model is not, so do not expose it to water, shock or dust and think it’ll survive, it likely won’t.