Overview
External SSDs are slowly but surely displacing classic USB memory sticks or external 2.5″ HDDs. They offer high speed, large storage and at the same time compact dimensions. I’ve been using Samsung’s T5 for some time now, and in the spring we also looked at SanDisk’s Portable SSD. Patriot, which collects plus points for great performance and reasonable prices in our reviews, is also coming to the market now with their PXD model.
PXD Portable SSD
We usually introduce you Patriot products in a game version under the Viper brand, but this time it is purely a Patriot product. Although PXD is not the first external SSD of this manufacturer, they already had the ELVR model with Thunderbolt 3, it can be said that PXD is the first mass product, mainly due to availability.
A classic paper packaging contains the SSD itself and a pair of cables, one with a USB-C pair and the other with a combination of USB type A and C. The SSD uses USB 3.2 gen 2 with a bandwidth of 10 Gb/s for transfers. It promises sequential speed of around 1000 MB/s for both write and read, which is significantly more than we have seen with external SSDs so far.
The design is simple but purposeful. The aluminium body has a slight blue tint, rounded edges and relatively compact dimensions. I would compare its size to a pack of chewing gum. PXD is similarly thin but longer. The front and back of the disk are black. There is a single USB-C port on the front and a connection indicating LED next to it.
It will be best to show the dimensions in comparison with other external SSDs, so we will compare the PXD with the already mentioned T5 and Portable SSD from SanDisk. As you can see, the PXD is about half the thickness of competing models, although it’s a bit longer than the SanDisk. The smaller dimensions were also reflected in the weight, which is only 35 grams. In comparison, SanDisk has 42 grams and Samsung 50 grams.
Testing took place as always on the Z390 chipset, specifically on the Gigabyte Aorus Z390 Xtreme motherboard with an Intel Core i9-9900K processor and 32 GB 3600 MHz DDR4 Corsair Dominator Platinum, from which 25 GB was allocated to the RAM disk.
