The ADATA Elite SE880 is the company's new flagship portable SSD. It uses the Silicon Motion SM2320G controller, which combines the USB interface and SSD controller into a single IC. This helps reduce cost and complexity, as just one instead of two chips is required. Obviously, this also means that drives can be more compact, because components are more tightly integrated. Unlike many other vendors, which build external SSDs by including a full-sized M.2 NVMe inside the case, ADATA was smart, choosing to go with a proper, highly compact design with the SE880. As a result, you get a tiny portable high-performance SSD—nearly all other competitors are considerably bigger.

Performance numbers of the ADATA SE880 are impressive. Thanks to its fast USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 20 Gbps interface, the 1 GB/s bottleneck of most external SSDs is no longer a problem. In terms of sequential speeds, the drive almost reaches 2 GB/s at even low queue depths, which is important if you copy just a single file at a time, the most common usage scenario for a portable SSD. Another important data point is that sequential mixed—write a file and read another file at the same time—completes at 1.2 GB/s, which is much faster than most other drives in our test group. Random IO is not that important for a portable SSD unless you want to run portable programs or games from it; for example, when using the SSD to expand storage on game consoles. In that use case, performance is really good, too, but not by as big a margin as with sequential IO. The only weak spot of the SE880 is random IO mixed, as there is no DRAM cache for the mapping tables of the SSD. However, that isn't a dealbreaker, as it is an ultra-rare workload for a portable SSD.

Physical construction of the ADATA SE880 is great, it uses a tough metal shell that's not only durable, but also looks good, thanks to the matte gray color that's just shiny enough to make it look high-quality. Fingerprints are not an issue at all. Unfortunately there is no IP dust/water protection rating, which probably wouldn't be that difficult to achieve, given the construction of the drive. Unlike some competing drives, you do not get an activity indicator LED, which can be useful to find out whether a transfer operation has completed. Temperatures were no problem on the SE880—it gets slightly warm to touch.

Sustained write speeds of the ADATA SE880 aren't that impressive. With 270 MB/s to fill the whole disk, it's slower than many of its competitors. If you plan on copying hundreds of gigabytes per session without pause, then look elsewhere. If your working sets are smaller, up to 100 GB writes, or you have pauses in transfers that give the drive room to breathe, the SE880 can shine though.

Currently the ADATA Elite SE880 sells for $130 in the 1 TB version, which is a reasonable price point, but around $30 more expensive than various USB 3.2 10 Gbps drives, which offer half the theoretical performance cap, but may still be fast enough in most scenarios. Out of the 20 Gbps drives, the strongest competitors are the WD Black for $120 and the Kingston XS2000 for $135. The Lexar SL660 is fairly expensive at $180, but offers RGB lighting, just like the ADATA SE900G ($150). We previously reviewed the Kingston XS2000, which is based on the same hardware components as the ADATA SE880, and which also comes with a very compact form factor. If you need a lot of storage, then the SE880 might be too small, because its capacity tops out at 1 TB, some competing drives go up to 4 TB, high capacity external SSDs are somewhat of a niche market though.

Overall the SE880 is a fantastic USB 3.2 2x2 20 Gbps SSD, not coming cheap, but offering a ton of performance. To enjoy the blazing speeds of the ADATA SE880, your computer has to support the USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 20 Gbps interface, or the SSD will operate at 10 Gbps, or even less. For AMD AM4, only six motherboards exist with 20 Gbps USB, so you'll probably have to use a PCIe add-in card. For Intel, the selection is decent, but requires the LGA1200/1700 platform. You can also pair these super-fast USB SSDs with the new consoles, but neither PS5 nor Xbox Series X have support for 20 Gbps USB, so your gains will be limited.