The new GigaDrive promises to be the world's fastest external SSD, and given that it uses one of our favorite NVMe SSDs at its heart, its pace is not surprising. the Thunderbolt 4 / USB4 connection gives this SSD very impressive peak values, but it also seems to be a limiting factor in real-world performance.

As games continue to grow in size, the idea of using external SSDs to bolster the storage capacity of gaming laptops and next-generation gaming consoles becomes much more appealing. Both notebooks and gaming consoles have limited space inside them and are much more difficult to expand permanently than a standard desktop gaming PC.

With no moving parts, high speed, and easy connectivity, SSDs are the perfect partner for gaming machines and are now fast enough that running games directly from an external drive does not interfere with gaming performance.

GigaDrive is aiming to come to the top of this market and has been selling directly to customers through IndieGogo for some time now. However, this is a limited time deal, and the company is looking to go beyond the confines of a crowdfunding platform, expecting prices to rise by nearly 50%.

Given that the fastest 1TB external drive we tested, the WD Black P50 Game Drive, costs $250, and we expect the GigaDrive to hit the $299 mark soon, this price may seem a bit steep.

The comparison is interesting given that this Thunderbolt drive actually uses a WD Black SN750 SSD as the device's foundation, hidden in a rugged enclosure with built-in heatsinks; with an IP67 rating, the GigaDrive can certainly withstand shock The GigaDrive is capable of withstanding It can be submerged at a depth of one meter for 30 minutes and has been drop tested from 10 feet.

I can attest to its sturdiness as I have inadvertently tested it being dropped from a standing desk from a height of 3.6 feet. I hit it against the edge of hard wood flooring and it still works.

Also, the inside of the angular black shroud is quite cool, reminiscent of the heat sink used when using the WD Black SN750 for internal PC use. With a peak temperature of 49°C after sustained use, it is clear that the GigaDrive will not melt silicon to shreds in the field.

Performance-wise, there are some interesting things to note thanks to the Thunderbolt 4 interface. Peak read/write speeds are impressive, exceeding 2,400 MB/sec and 2,200 MB/sec, respectively; in the ATTO and AS SSD synthetic tests, the GigaDrive never reached its peak rated 2,800 MB/sec, but in these benchmarks drives rarely reach their full potential.

This is when connected to an Asus ROG Maximus XIII Hero Z590 test board with a Thunderbolt 4 connection. When connected via USB instead, the drive saturates the interface and peak performance is only 1,000 MB/s.

In short, Thunderbolt is absolutely the way forward for the GigaDrive. It is great for large file transfers like 4K video for editing, but not so great for mixed file types or running games.

So the interesting thing is the performance for small 4K files. This details how well the drive and interface can manage the many small read/write operations that an SSD may go through when running software directly from the drive itself. For internal SSDs, this is a great indicator of general lightness when running the Windows OS, but for external drives, it helps to see how effective they are when holding, for example, a semi-permanent game library.

And this is where the GigaDrive and its Thunderbolt 4 connection fall down. The 4k write performance is really low, one-tenth that of the WD Black SN750 drive when connected to the NVMe interface. It is also 76% slower than the GigaDrive's 4k write speed when connected to USB 3.2, at only 15 MB/sec.

Therefore, some game transfers will be considerably slower; the 30GB file transfer test folder is composed of many different file types and game installations, and therefore contains many small files. Therefore, the folder copy test took 284 seconds with Thunderbolt and only 206 seconds with USB 3.2.

The GigaDrive is therefore a slightly different product. While technically on par with the best of external SSDs, the Thunderbolt connection seems to really struggle; peak sequential performance of SSDs is well over 1GB/sec at this point, so real-world speed is the more important part of the storage equation.

Interestingly, the GigaDrive has both, only requiring the use of separate connections for each.