SSK 1TB SSD USB C Stick Up to 1000MB/s, Fast External SSD Hard Drive 1TB Type-c +USB A USB 3.2 Gen 2, USB Memory Stick for iPhone 15/PS4/Android Phone/Tablet/Windows/Mac

Great little stick!
I’ve never heard of the SSK brand before, but this little stick is rather impressive. I’ve performed a couple of tests to ensure data integrity so I know I can trust this stick with my data as some shady brands and fake devices are out there.Let’s start with delivery:It arrived quickly (as I always experience with items purchased on Amazon that are marked with Prime), came in a standard Amazon cardboard envelope and was easily posted through my letterbox. Nice to know I didn’t have to be at home for the delivery.Initial impressions:It comes in a small-ish box with the advertised keyring attachment in there. The stick is held in place by a bit of card creating a bit of a cushion from the outer box. The drive looks and feels quite nice and well-built. I wouldn’t be afraid of dropping it and it breaking. I’ve not dropped it at all though as I don’t intend on intentionally causing damage. That wouldn’t be a great start for a £73 purchase 😄. The USB A side has a nice cap, it’s a shame I can’t pop the cap over the USB C side as I feel it could be easily lost. So make sure you keep it somewhere safe while using the drive. The USB C side however is a little different. There’s a flip-out cap on a hinge which is quite nice as you can’t lose something that doesn’t come off however, it does barely move past 90° which I think could cause some clearance issues for some users. It also only moves in one direction, but since USB C is reversible, that not likely much of an issue if clearance isn’t already an issue. Fortunately, no clearance issue for me and my intended use cases. It came already pre-formatted exFAT which should be fine for use on Windows, macOS and Android at least. I’d imagine since it works on my Macbook, it should probably work right away on iPhone too.Heat:The first thing I noticed about this drive is it does get rather warm after a long session of writing files. It appears to have impacted the performance a bit, but not as much as I expected it would, which is a good thing! So something to note there, it may be a little hot if you copy a massive file over to it and grab it right away. I didn’t think to consider idle heat before running any tests, so I can’t comment on that, however, it does seem to remain warm but not as hot as after the initial H2testw test I performed (more on that later). This could be due to it performing maintenance/cleanup tasks because it’s a flash-based device. This would lead me to believe it performs TRIM by itself, perhaps when the drive is in an idle state, which is the process of erasing unused data on the drive in the most simple terms. All SSDs do this however, it’s usually your operating system (i.e Windows) that tells the drive to do this. What also adds to this assumption is the fact that it shows up as a Hard Disk drive in Windows’s built-in Optimise Drives utility, so you can’t easily (if at all?) instruct it to perform a TRIM operation.Testing notes:It would be wise to say that it is required to have a device that supports USB 3.2 Gen 2 otherwise, you will not get near the advertised speeds. I will admit, I was a little lazy and popped it into my powered USB hub, which does support USB 3.2 Gen 2 as does my desktop, although I do have other peripherals connected through it, such as my mouse, keyboard, fingerprint reader and some other bits, so I would expect it to not quite match the advertised speed.Unknown brand:Now I want to raise my scepticism. Being a brand I’d never heard of, how could I be sure it wasn’t just a scam of some sort, like the classic portable HDDs that get sold, only to find out it’s just a 1GB micro SD card in there with a bit of metal hot glued inside to give it weight to feel legitimate. Well, I ran H2testw which is a software that will write test files to fill up the entire drive and then read them all back to verify the content of the test files. This means if any fakery was going on, well the data would clearly be incorrect. I’m happy to say, that it passed the test rather quickly too considering I’m testing the 1TB model. Coming back to the section about heat, it started writing at around 640MB/s and eventually dipped to 626MB/s by the end of the test. I believe that is likely due to how warm it was getting as it was writing to the drive for a solid 26 minutes, so it should be expected to generate some heat because of that. While 640MB/s isn’t quite the advertised 10000/MBs, real-world usage is in general less than advertised and given this was a testing software, it’s still not a real-world use case, but that’s still decently fast for a USB stick, so I’m quite happy with what I’m seeing there.Speed test:As in the marking material above, I too often use Crystal Diskmark to bench-test the speed of a storage device. Now you’ll notice the write speeds don’t look too great in my post H2testw screenshot and you guessed it, that’s because I ran it after running the H2testw test. going back to TRIM, this isn’t entirely unexpected behaviour as it will take some time to erase data on a flash storage device. SSDs and other flash-based devices like this don’t delete data right away (nor do HDDs for that matter), the data just gets marked as deleted and then removed at a later point, often via TRIM as previously mentioned. I spared little time between the H2testw test and running Crystal Diskmark, so those initial performance results are not shocking, but rather a testimony to the drive’s capabilities! 432MB/s after filling the entire drive and then deleting it all isn’t too bad in my books. After leaving the drive plugged in for a while, I ran another speed test 20 minutes later to somewhat confirm my suspicions of idle maintenance and I’m happy to report that they certainly improved! 896MB/s is a lot closer to the advertised speed which is fantastic. So if you delete a massive amount of files, I would advise leaving it connected for a while so it can do its maintenance stuff and keep the performance high.Overall, I’m extremely happy with this USB stick and I can see it being very handy over the coming years. Thanks for a great product SKK, you’ve certainly not disappointed me here. 🙂

Very useful but …
Sturdy construction but runs VERY hot.

Works well. Sturdy and portable ends well protected.
Hadn’t realised it was made of steel, pleasant surprise.Fast file transfer speeds compared to my other sticks.

Best purchase in a while
This hard drive is fantastic. Fast, and I can carry a lot of files on it, having bought the maximum capacity. The other thing I like is the fact it comes with a free leather storage pouch, complete with loop to put on your keyring, it is now on mine. Well worth it.

USB-stick voldoet niet aan mijn verwachtingen. Loopt vast zowel in de laptop als ook in de smart tv, waarbij zelfs bestanden beschadigd raken.

Extra techniczne możliwości i parametry połączone z małymi wymiarami. Wyglada solidnie , mam nadzieję ,że będzie solidnie funkcjonował.

Prima USB stick, snel up en downloaden. Behuizing is van aluminium en wordt daardoor goed gekoeld en is echt solide. Voor die 1tb een goede keuze maar de prijs zou iets lager moeten liggen.