SanDisk recently unveiled its 8TB portable SSD, which it calls the world's first 8TB portable SSD. The company is also showing off this storage device at CES. However, it's still a prototype. We have all the reasons to believe that this product could soon become ready for shipping. There isn't much to the prototype that seems to require changes. This spacious SSD is packaged in a durable-looking enclosure.
While the 8TB storage space sounds all nice and dandy, it's the price that is going to determine if the portable storage is worth buying. There is a similar portable SSD that SanDisk offers that top out at 2TB and cost a whopping $500. Going with this pricing, we can assume that the 8TB version could carry a heavy price tag of $1,000 or more. This is where excited power users may lose interest, and we understand why. There are many other brands on the market selling portable SSDs at affordable prices, one of which is Samsung's T5 SSD, which we really like.
There is no denying that SSDs are inherently a lot faster than traditional hard drives. The only bottleneck to these devices is the interface that they use to connect with a PC. In this case, the 8TB portable SSD from SanDisk takes advantage of the USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 interface supporting 20Gbps. The theoretical maximum bandwidth one can achieve with this interface is 2,500MB/s.
As of now, SanDisk hasn't provided any benchmark about its touted SSD. We think that the SSD won't be able to offer 2,500MB/s speeds, because it will be limited by overheads. But, at the same time, we think that this SSD can not only turn out to be a capacious portable SSD, but also the fastest one as well.
We'll let you know more about SanDisk's 8TB portable SSD when the company unveils more information. Until then, you can check out Seagate's FireCuda Gaming SSD and BarraCuda Fast SSD, which were also revealed at CES last week.
