Pioneer512G External SSD-USB C – up to 1050MB/s - USB 3.2 Gen2 -Portable Solid State Drive (APS-XS05 PRO)- Space Gray

The Pioneer XS05 PRO portable SSD is a very small plug and play drive that you can use to boot from or store files for accessing on the go. It is well suited for anyone who has an ultrabook with a smaller SSD or for creatives who may want to edit files both at home on their PC and then also transfer files to it so they can continue working on their laptop whilst on the go.The drive is absolutely tiny and travels very well in the pocket of a laptop bag. It comes with a USB C cable and USB A cable, which means it'll be great for most modern PCs, laptops, media centres, televisions, and even mobile phones. I tried it on an array of different devices and operating systems that accept external drives and it worked plug-and-play on all of them except the MacBook M1. This will be disappointing to many (myself included as I own an M1), but it's hard to place too much blame on Pioneer here as the M1s have an issue recognising many external SSD drives from many manufacturers. Hopefully this will get fixed in an update, but we're about 6 months since release now and nothing has been announced yet. So, with this in mind... I can't recommend it if you're using an M1.As I've not been able to use it on my M1, I've been using it on my Windows PC that has USB 3.1 and USB 3.0 ports and an older MacBook Air that I use exclusively for work. As other reviewers have already posted the 3.1 and 3.2 speeds, I thought I'd and post up the USB 3.0 read speeds of around 460mb/s and write speeds of 450mb/s with an image of the Crystal Mark bench for anyone interested too.The build quality is very good. I wouldn't be too worried about the odd drop with this. It's ironic that it matches my space grey M1 that it doesn't work with, but the colour is very nice and professional regardless of whether it matches your laptop or not.Overall, this is a great little external SSD Drive. It's a massive shame it doesn't work on M1 MacBooks (at time of writing), but for everyone else it'll be a solid choice that's fast and easy to transport.

Given its size and shape, I wouldn't be surprised if this wasn't a standard M.2 SSD wrapped in aluminium, with the aluminium functioning as a stylish case and as a heatsink. It's a very convenient size for carrying around, and it comes with a couple of high-quality thick plastic cables, one USB-C to USB-C and the other USB-A to USB-C, which means the drive can fit almost any modern device. I'm using it on a PC with an Asus Z270 motherboard which has USB3.0 and USB3.1, but not the USB3.2 that this drive supports.When plugged in to a USB 3.0 port I can write a sustained stream of files to the Pioneer drive at a fairly consistent 335 MB/s for the first 150 GB, and about 70 MB/s thereafter. When plugged into a USB 3.1 port, I can write to the drive with an initial burst of roughly 1024 MB/s, but this very quickly drops to 870 MB/s for the first 150 GB or so, and then further to 70 MB/s. What this suggests is that the drive has about 150 GB of fast memory, and the remainder is slower. This is normal in SSDs, and allows a good compromise between performance, capacity and cost. If you're not hammering more than 150 GB of data onto the drive all at once, it will do housekeeping in background, moving data into the slower memory, and freeing up the fast stuff for the next time you write data in. With USB 3.2, the initial 150 GB of writes would presumably be even faster. Reading data back over USB 3.1 was a fairly consistent 800 MB/s or so.When writing to the drive, the aluminium shell gets quite hot, so I begin to understand why some people recommend fitting heat sinks to M.2 drives. It does look and feel quite good; unfortunatly, there's a huge plastic sticker covering most of one side of the drive, which looks rather less good.If you have USB 3.1 or better, this drive will perform better than an internal SATA SSD and comparably to an NVMe M.2 SSD, which is what I suspect it is. Other devices on the same USB controller could potentally slow the drive down a bit, of course.In terms of speed and convenience, this small external SSD is likely to fulfil the needs of most users.

This drive looks fantastic. So small but holds 512GB of data. It is a bit wider than a USB stick and longer - not as long as a ball point pen so really easy to slip into a pocket. My son used it to back up all his data on his gaming PC which he also uses to programme on (in Haskell and Lisp etc. so has alot of files). Initially transfer speed was super quick but then the drive seemed to slow down. It also felt a bit hot. However, we idn't really need it to be super fast the selling point for my son is that it holds lots of data that he can transport around the place. It would be great for a college or Uni student (if you don't want to trust your work to the cloud). I'm impressed our previous external drive held a bit more than this but is a block the size of a cd case, this is much smaller and neater. It only seems to be available on Amazon, I couldn't see it for sale anywhere else.

To begin with, it arrives well packaged, quite suitable to be a gift as it is.It is super slim and compact with excellent storage, much smaller in suze than my previous HP unit but so much large in its storage capacity.I have not noticed any particular speed difference though, well, it was very fast but, then, it is just photos and occasional video I would be storing on it, it is for pure personal use, to back up family photos and such, so I did nit test it to its fullest. And for my modest demands, this is a perfect unit. It is so easy to store, take with you and simply manipulate. It is lightweight and looks very smart. It has the necessary cables (I won't be repeating the description) so it is super easy to connect to a laptop or a phone. I am loving it and am super happy with this order. I think it is a great investment, and if I had to use it for work, to back up or handle some projects, I would have been very happy with this small-sized gadget.