Introduction

Netac is a flash storage expert company based out of Shenzen, China. It was founded in 1999 and has always had a focus on flash-based products, such as USB drives and memory cards, but also venturing into DRAM-based memory like DDR4. While the company's main focus of operation is their OEM business, producing flash products for various clients, they are now making a big push to enter the DIY retail space with their own products.



Today, we're reviewing the Netac ZX20 Portable SSD in the 1 TB variant. The ZX20 is Netac's flagship drive and utilizes the blazing fast USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 20 Gbps interface, which doubles the bandwidth over USB 3.2 Gen 2x1, aka USB 3.1 Gen 2. Many portable SSDs using USB 3.2 Gen 2x1 were bottlenecked by the USB interface speed, so it makes sense to increase the interface transfer rate by another notch. We previously reviewed several other 20 Gbps portable drives, and many of them were using a combination of a classic SSD controller plus a bridge chip that translates the USB protocol into whatever interface the controller speaks. Obviously, requiring two components increases complexity, size, and cost, and nowadays, supply chain logistics can be an issue too. The Netac ZX20 portable SSD uses the new Silicon Motion SM2320G controller, combining the company's SSD controller IP with an integrated USB interface, making it much simpler to build high-performance portable storage devices.

There's not a lot of motherboards with USB 3.2 2x2 20 Gbps support out there. Especially on AMD AM4 the situation is complicated, I know of only six AM4 boards with USB 3.2 2x2, out of approximately 250. For Intel LGA1700 platform, the situation is better, out of 250 motherboards around 120 support the fastest USB interface. The odds are also pretty good with AMD's newest Socket AM5 generation. Out of around 70 boards, 40 have support for USB 3.2 2x2.

This review covers the 1 TB version of the Netac ZX20, which is the largest capacity available, there's also a 512 GB version.