Stefan Mileschin

At CES 2019, Western Digital demonstrated a number of direct-attached flash solutions. Out of all the showcased items with imminent retail availability, one deserves separate mention. Under the SanDisk brand, Western Digital is introducing an higher-performance follow-up to the the SanDisk Extreme Portable SSD (a portable USB DAS that has impressed us with its performance and thermal characteristics). The new product carries the PRO branding and will be available in retail in Spring 2019.

Almost all high-end flash-based bus-powered storage devices now use a Thunderbolt 3 Type-C interface with a PCIe 3.0 x4 NVMe SSD behind the Alpine Ridge controller. Some vendors have made an attempt to bring economical alternatives in this market segment by using a PCIe 3.0 x2 NVMe SSD (reference design from Phison). However, leading brands such as Western Digital / SanDisk and Seagate have refrained from playing in this market with mainstream offerings. The reason is not hard to see, as these high-performance Thunderbolt 3 SSDs can't be used with regular USB Type-C ports despite being physically compatible. This results in the vendors having to field customer support calls from the average users.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/13824...-ssd-goes-nvme