Review: Apricorn's Aegis 3.0 portable drive offers an SSD option for better performance
Apricorn’s Aegis Portable 3.0 is a handsome 2.5-inch, silver and black, USB 3.0 external drive with an integrated cable—and it ships in both hard-drive and SSD flavors. If that isn’t a siren’s call to see just how much of a performance boost you get from a solid-state drive in an external USB 3.0 enclosure, I don’t know what is. Apricorn thoughtfully shipped us both versions so we could answer that call.
There’s no outward difference between the SSD version (outfitted with a 256GB SanDisk SD6SB1M256G1022I) and the hard-drive model (which comes with a 1TB, 2.5-inch Toshiba MQ01ABD100), aside from the fact that the SSD version weighs an ounce or two less.
ROBERT CARDINThe Aegis Portable 3.0 comes in an attractive enclosure with an attached USB 3.0 cable.
The Lab ran both models through PCWorld’s 10GB-file stress tests, copying data to and from a 16GB RAM drive, and the differences were as vivid as Apricorn’s advertising claims—at least when writing data to the drives. The 256GB SSD version wrote our single 10GB file at 334 megabytes per second, which is almost three times faster than the hard-drive version’s 115.5 MBps.
With a 10GB mix of small files and folders, the difference in write speed was even more pronounced: 102.7 MBps to 22.6 MBps. But 22.6 MBps is poky, even for a hard drive. We saw similarly subpar write performance from Apricorn’s Aeigis Bio, so it might be the bridge controller. By way of comparison, Seagate’s Wireless Plus 1TB wrote the same test file at 93 MBps, and other external USB 3.0 hard drives we’ve tested typically measure anywhere from 50 MBps to 80 MBps.
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