InspiredCode
I'm looking forward to the Adata SE920 coming out in April. It is the first external SSD with a Thunderbolt 4 (USB 4) controller. All of the drives that currently claim to be USB 4 are actually just pairing a USB 3 chip and Thunderbolt 3 chip together in a way they can auto-switch, but they don't get close the the maximum speed of the standard. The benchmarks on an Apple Silicon Mac are really close the the theoretical maximum 4000 MB/s with 3800 MB/s read and 3200 MB/s write. It also works with USB 3 (unlike most Thunderbolt drives) or Thunderbolt 3 for machines without Thunderbolt 4. It uses the ASMedia ASM2464PD chip which is much faster than the current top of the line Intel JHL7440. This will be great for creative workflows or adding some fast external storage to a Mac Studio. Currently the top-of-line external SSDs top out at 2800 MB/s because they are limited by the Intel JHL7440 chipset that is now 5 years old. This is as fast as we can get on current Macs. The next spec update will be USB4v2 which will be 2-3 times faster then USB4 and will max out what they can get over a Thunderbolt 3 cable. Older TB3 cables will still work with USB4v2.
