ADATA ELITE SE880 1TB Review

Conclusion

With all the numbers gathered and after months of use, performance consistency is where the ELITE SE880 is a hit and a miss at the same time. It’ll depend on the kind of files you work with, but if you’re looking to use this drive to move large folders regularly, then you should know when the cache is spent, write speeds can be as low as 100MB/s, which is essentially early USB 3.0 speeds. This only happens after you’ve copied at least 100GB of data at the highest speeds, after which the transfer rate will decrease rather dramatically.

Not an issue if the drive was 256GB at most, however for a 1TB portable drive I do think the performance should be maintained for at least 200GB of sequential data written. As is, filling even half the drive can take a bit too long which could mean you end up not using the drive at all for large data transfers, which defeats the purpose of it being a 1TB drive.

That said, most people will not normally copy over 100GB in one go, so this isn’t of great concern. Those backing up entire PCs however may grow frustrated with the speed after the first 100GB. For the going price, size and performance before the cache fills up, this is a decent drive. It may not be water proof like the many ADATA drives before, but for what it is, it more than delivers.