ADATA SD810 Review: Compact and Rugged Portable SSD with Fast Transfer Speeds

Compared to portable hard drives, portable solid-state drives don’t break that easily if you accidentally drop them, but this doesn’t mean that they can survive a splash of water or sprinkle of sand. This is what the ADATA SD810 Portable SSD has been made for, it is a compact, yet rugged portable drive that measures slightly larger than an eraser block, and let’s take a look at what it offers.

The ADATA SD810 comes in a rather unmatching purple color packaging, as the drive comes in black and silver color options, I would have liked if it came in a white or black box to match the drive. Anyway, the drive that we got is the 2TB capacity model, which is the highest storage that ADATA sells, it is compatible with PlayStation 5 and Xbox aside from PC and Mac.

Inside the box, you get a USB-A to USB-C and USB-C to USB-C Cable, a user manual and the drive itself, which are pretty standard things that come in a portable SSD.

The aluminum chassis of the ADATA SD810 isn’t boring flat as ADATA has given it an aerodynamic design, it weighs just 41g and measures 12mm thick, which you won’t feel a thing if you slide it into your pockets.

With a very robust flap that protects the USB-C port, it is no wonder that the drive is IP68 certified against dust and water, while ADATA has claimed that the drive has passed stringent military grade standards against drops up to 1.22m, this drive has no problems taking a dip in the pool or being buried in sand, which is particularly useful for those who intends to take it into the wilderness.

What’s particularly impressive about the ADATA SD810 is its fast transfer speeds, which ADATA has quoted 2000MB/s of read and write speeds on the packaging and achieved with the USB 3.2 Gen 2×2 port, it is of course a far cry from what we usually see on desktops, but most similar priced portable SSDs are still offering a quarter of its speed.

The ADATA SD810 managed to achieve its advertised transfer speeds when we ran synthetic disk benchmarks on our Windows PC with a USB 4 port.

Unfortunately, the drive’s performance fell short when it is connected to our 16-inch M3 Pro MacBook Pro, it managed to achieve 1.5GB/s of read speed but the write speed is way down below 1GB/s, this is really odd since the drive performs way above USB 10Gbps on read speed, we have reached out to ADATA on this but unfortunately wasn’t able to get further information on why this happened.

Despite the disappointing results on our M3 Pro MacBook Pro, I’m glad to report that the ADATA SD810 remained warm despite using it for video editing workflows and running games.

The ADATA SD810 comes in capacities of 500GB, 1TB, 2TB and 4TB. At this time of writing, we only managed to retrieve prices for the 1TB and 2TB model in Malaysia, which goes for RM469 and RM749 respectively, which is pretty attractive for the performance you are getting as it would have been more than RM1000 a few years back.

Purchase the ADATA SD810 at Lazada and Shopee.