Glyph Atom EX40 review: Rugged, portable 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 had been top-notch. Alas, it ain’t low cost, although with the present excessive worth of NAND it’s trying virtually like a discount.

Read on to be taught extra, then see our roundup of the best external 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 vast, 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 Type-C port clearly spells out (see the picture under). Glyph bundles a 7-inch (together with the connectors) Type-C to Type-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 embody free information restoration — very uncommon for a boutique storage vendor.

There’s no said TBW score (terabytes that could be written beneath guarantee) for the EX40, however 600TBW is the business norm. The probabilities of the common end-user writing even that a lot information inside a decade are slim to none. Videographers, possibly.

How a lot does the Glyph Atom EX40 price?

Hang onto your hats, people, it’s a wild monetary trip to proudly owning an SSD lately. Two months in the past, the EX40 would’ve seemed expensive certainly. Now? $390 for 1TB, $500 for 2TB, $850 for 4TB, and $1,700 for 8TB don’t look half unhealthy.

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

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

How quick is the Glyph Atom EX40?

The Atom EX40’s efficiency is superb. If you learn my evaluate of the 20Gbps Atom EX20, you recognize that I had points with the included cable. The EX40 shipped with what seemed like an similar cable, however had no points. Go determine. Firmware? Handshaking?

The Atom EX40, whereas not excellent in CrystalDiskMark 8’s sequential exams, turned in very spectacular 4K and real-world switch instances. Thanks to 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 Pro put in, and the Ugreen CM850 enclosure, wherein I put in an equally quick WD SN850X.

Note that after I seek advice from a product as an enclosure, it means it ships unpopulated, with no drive inside.

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

Here you may see a number of 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 complete, I’m positive you’ll be happy with the Atom EX40’s efficiency. It additionally sheds warmth effectively beneath load, regardless of the silicone jacket.

Should you purchase the Glyph Atom EX40?

The reply to this query could be sure when you 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 is probably not the cheaper possibility for lengthy.

Price apart, the Glyph Atom EX40 is good-looking, rugged, and quick. You received’t be disillusioned.

How we check

Drive exams at present make the most of Windows 11 24H2, 64-bit operating 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 primary) to search out the storage machine’s potential efficiency. Then we run a collection of 48GB switch and 450GB write exams utilizing Windows Explorer drag and drop to point out what customers will see throughout routine copy operations, in addition to the far speedier 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 exams. Formerly the 48GB exams had been accomplished with a RAM disk serving that goal.

Each check 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 because 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.