The unique selling point of Team Group's Treasure Touch portable SSD is its RGB lighting with the ability to switch between various color themes by tapping on the SSD. While that sounds great in theory, I found it of limited use—wouldn't you just set the lighting to what you like and leave it at that? In my testing, the touch interface was responsive, but I had to read the manual first to understand that double-tapping switches the RGB effect and triple-tapping turns off all RGB. What's clearly missing is some sort of software control that lets me configure the lighting from within Windows, which would open up additional possibilities, like more customizations, possibly with different patterns, speeds, and colors. What I like is that there's an option to turn off the RGB when you have to go into stealth mode during an important meeting, for example. Other portable SSDs lack that ability.

In terms of performance, the Treasure Touch can't compete with PCIe NVMe based portable drives because the Treasure Touch uses a 2.5" SATA drive under the hood. Despite support for the USB 10 Gbps interface, the SATA interface will limit performance, bottlenecking the whole drive at 500 MB/s. In our testing, we found decent performance if you accept that limitation—around 450 MB/s read, write, and mixed, which is quite good for a SATA SSD, but not even close to what we've seen on NVMe-powered models. For the vast majority of users, this level of performance is sufficient, though.

Internally, Team Group is using a USB-to-SATA bridge chip that feeds the USB packets into a full-size SATA SSD PCB. While such a two-PCB approach might make sense for low production volumes, I feel like additional cost savings should be possible by more closely integrating all components. The combination of Samsung 64-layer TLC flash with the SMI SM2258H controller is a very well-tested setup, so the drive shouldn't run into any stability issues. The physical construction of the Treasure Touch is good, as most of the drive is made out of metal. Temperatures were no problem on the T-Force Treasure Touch because only ten LEDs are used, and the drive doesn't get that warm anyway because of the relatively average performance it offers.

We measured a pseudo-SLC cache size of 10 GB, which is very small by today's standards. That said, the performance difference between pSLC and direct-to-TLC writing is minimal, so you'll barely notice it in real life. What I do like is that write speeds are sustained very well. With 443 MB/s to fill the whole drive, the Treasure Touch is very similar to other portable SSDs and actually beats many, some of them even NVMe-based models.

Priced at $150 for the tested 1 TB version, the Team Group T-Force Treasure Touch is quite expensive. You can get faster portable SSDs for less money, or drives with more complex RGB illumination. On the other hand, none have the "touch" aspect. I still feel the price has to come down a bit to be more competitive, something around $100 to $105 would definitely help.