Samsung's external drives have generally been for the power user who wants it all-speed, capacity, and portability-but who is willing to pay a premium for it. Well it's not technically a HDD, I suppose But it’s not enough to spoil an otherwise highly appealing package. That’s a little off the pace of some alternatives. The only slight chink in the SE800’s armor is that sustained performance drops down to around 260MB/s after around 15GB of internal drive traffic. Performance-wise, in testing the Adata delivers in the headline 1GB/s spec for sequential transfers while notching up 4K random throughput that’s comparable to the competition at 21MB/s for reads and 40MB/s for writes. That makes it unique among these SSDs and, what’s more, given the competitive pricing you’re getting that IP rating effectively for free. It means the drive is rated as impervious to dust ingress and can survive immersion in up to 1.5 meters of water for 30 minutes. All very nice, but what is really unusual is the SE800’s IP68 rating, a characteristic hinted at by the pop-off cover over the USB Type-C port. The latter is typically slower and offers lower write endurance.
It’s also nice to see that Adata has equipped the SE800 with TLC rather than QLC NAND memory.