ADATA brought some innovative storage products to the 2025 International CES. The XPG MARS 970 Storm is an M.2 NVMe Gen 5 SSD with a self-contained liquid cooling loop. Its construction involves a baseplate from which heat is conventionally transferred to a cylindrical heat dissipation surface—a sort of radiator, where a pair of tiny 20 mm fans push and pull air through, to keep the controller cool. Speaking of which, the drive is based on the Silicon Motion SM2508 flagship controller that's built on the TSMC 6 nm process. It comes in capacities of up to 8 TB. ADATA claims sequential transfer speeds of up to 14 GB/s reads, with up to 12 GB/s writes.

You can have this drive without this cooling solution (eg: if you have a nice one of your own from your motherboard). It's called the MARS 970 Blade. It can be used without a cooler, but performance will be lesser. ADATA hence advertises sequential speeds of up to 12 GB/s reads, with up to 10 GB/s writes. The MARS 970 Blade strangely only comes in capacities of up to 4 TB—there's no 8 TB variant.We now switch focus to portable SSDs, and the product that caught our eye is the SR800, a power bank SSD. Don't you sometimes wish your iPhone Pro Max writing ProRes video to a portable SSD wasn't draining power? Here's your answer. The SR800 features a USB 3.2 Gen 2 x2 interface (20 Gbps), with transfer rates of up to 2000 MB/s reads and writes, but it also encloses a 5,000 mAh battery, and can charge your phone at 20 W (USB-PD). But wait, there's more—it even features a wireless charging surface, and you can place your phone on top of it for up to 15 W wireless power delivery. The drive is based on a Silicon Motion SM2320 controller, and comes win capacities of up to 4 TB.The ADATA XPG SE940 is the industry's smallest portable SSD with a USB4 interface. It takes advantage of 40 Gbps USB4 to offer sequential transfer speeds of up to 4 GB/s, and comes in capacities of up to 8 TB. This drive is based on an SMI sourced single-chip controller. Next up, is the SR820 a compact portable SSD with a 20 Gbps USB 3.2 interface for transfer speeds of up to 2 GB/s, capacities of up to 4 TB, and an on-device fingerprint reader for biometric data security.

A highlight in the consumer storage portfolio was ADATA's new SDXC SD 8.0 Express memory card. This is basically SD over PCIe, and at the physical layer is PCIe 3.0 x2, to offer speeds comparable to CFexpress—up to 1600 MB/s reads, with up to 1200 MB/s writes, and sufficient minimum write speeds for 8K RAW recording.