Addlink P50 review: A versatile USB flash drive hiding SSD might

Price When Reviewed

500GB: $66.44 I 1TB: $104.44 I 2TB: 188.44

Best Prices Today: Addlink P50 thumb drive SSD

I’ve seen fairly just a few USB thumb drives recently sporting twin Type-A/Type-C connectors on both finish — it’s develop into a well-liked technique to guarantee connectivity throughout the most important variety of units.

The Addlink P50 reviewed right here is one other such tiny, light-weight beastie that performs across the 10Gbps median — with regular quantities of information. However, write velocity drops drastically (an understatement) when it runs out of secondary cache.

Read on to be taught extra, then see our roundup of the best external drives for comparability.

What are the Addlink P50’s options?

The P50 is a USB 3.2 10Gbps (Gen 2) thumb drive with a Type-A connector on one finish and a Type-C connector on the opposite. Both are lined by detachable finish caps to guard the connector/s not in use.

The P50 is 3-inches in size, 0.75-inches in breadth, and roughly 0.4-inches in thickness. Weight is 16 grams (0.6 ounces). Our unit was rendered in metal blue with brown tinted finish caps.

If I’ve any grievance concerning the solidly constructed P50, it’s that the top caps aren’t captive — i.e., they’re very simple to misplace. At least for hasty, forgetful folks similar to myself.

Addlink warranties the P50 for 3 years, which is the norm for reasonably priced exterior storage. No TBW score (terabytes which may be written earlier than read-only) was supplied, however given the light-duty function, the drive ought to maintain up for a decade on the very least.

How a lot is the P50?

At the time of this writing, the P50 was $66.44 within the 500GB capability, $104.44 for the 1TB model we examined, and $188.44 on the 2TB degree (Amazon). That’s about what you’ll pay for the 10Gbps competitors.

Why the 44 cents when not a share low cost? Couldn’t inform you. But little question, a calculator was concerned.

How quick is the Addlink P50?

For regular operations, the P50 is basically on par for a 10Gbps USB SSD/thumb drive. That mentioned, the one 10Gbps drive (together with all kinds) it really beat general was the 1TB PNY Duo Link V3, and it didn’t accomplish that by very a lot.

The P50’s CrystalDiskMark 8 sequential throughput numbers have been good, if lower than the 2TB Teamgroup X2 Max’s.

CrystalDiskMark confirmed the one space the place the P50 actually lagged behind the Duo Link V3 — random ops. Then once more, so did the X2 Max.

With regular giant transfers (48GB is a few dozen 1080p, full-length motion pictures), the P50 was inside spittin’ distance of the X2 Max and typically the Duo Link V3 — relying on the take a look at.

Note that in case you’re not utilizing the time-saving FastCopy, you ought to be, although it’s of way more profit with inside NVMe.

The Addlink P50 shares a not-so-wonderful trait with the PNY Duo Link V3 — it’s useless sluggish as soon as it runs out of secondary cache.

It took about eight minutes for the P50 to put in writing the primary 270GB of our 450GB file. Not dangerous for 10Gbps. However, it then took the higher a part of two hours to put in writing the remaining 180GB. Argh!

Write velocity throughout this second section hovered round 25MBps. Occasionally effervescent as much as round 70MBps, however not for very lengthy and sometimes dropping to 5MBps.

Though the Teamgroup X2 Max was a 2TB drive, even off-secondary-cache velocity solely dropped to round 675MBps — far quicker than both of the opposite two drives proven.

Further illustration of the 1TB P50’s yin and yang efficiency is proven under. It’s good (for 10Gbps) till it’s most decidedly not.

Overall, for the overwhelming majority of customers and almost all regular write operations, the P50 is simply high-quality. But if you wish to fill it each time you employ it, get one thing else. You may think about the 2TB model for extra time on secondary cache; don’t go for the 500GB model that may run out of secondary cache in half the time proven above.

Should you purchase the P50?

For light-duty storage and transport, the P50 is okay. However, regardless of the Addlink hype about AI and 4K video, prosumers seeking to offload hefty quantities of content material ought to look elsewhere (X2 Max). Or no less than to the 2TB model, which gained’t run out of steam as shortly.

How we take a look at

Drive assessments at the moment make the most of Windows 11 24H2, 64-bit working off of a PCIe 4.0 Samsung 990 Pro in an Asus Z890-Creator WiFi (PCIe 4.0/5.0) motherboard. The CPU is a Core Ultra i5 225 feeding/fed by two Crucial 64GB DDR5 5600MHz modules (128GB of reminiscence complete).

Both 20Gbps USB and Thunderbolt 5 are built-in into the motherboard and Intel CPU/GPU graphics are used. Internal 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 previous) to search out the storage system’s potential efficiency. Then we run a collection of 48GB switch and 450GB write assessments utilizing Windows Explorer drag and drop to point out what customers will see throughout routine copy operations, in addition to the far quicker FastCopy run as administrator to point out what’s potential.

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 assessments. Formerly the 48GB assessments have been completed with a RAM disk serving that objective.

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

Our testing MO continuously evolves and these outcomes might not match these from earlier articles. Only comparisons contained in the article are 100% legitimate as these are gathered utilizing the present {hardware} and MO.