Patriot Memory 'Evlvr' Thunderbolt 3 portable SSD boasts high transfer rates, power efficiency

Inside the Evlvr Thunderbolt 3 Portable SSD is a Phison E8 PCIe controller, which Patriot claims allows the drive to be three times faster than traditional external solid state drives. Taking advantage of the vast bandwidth offered by Thunderbolt 3, the Evlvr is capable of sequential read speeds of up to 1,500 megabytes per second, and up to 1,000 megabytes per second in sequential writing speeds.

Externally, the Evlvr has a single LED indicator and a Thunderbolt 3 port on one end, with the rest of the surfaces left blank. The Thunderbolt 3 connection also provides the unit with its power, meaning it only requires a single cable for both power and data transfers, rather than needing separate cables.

Patriot will start selling the Evlvr, said by the firm to be an abbreviation of Evolver, from March via its own website and select retailers. The drive will be priced at $199.99 for the 256 gigabyte model, rising to $289.99 for 512 gigabytes, with the highest capacity 1 terabyte drive expected to sell at $489.99.

Patriot is the latest in a number of firms to recently start offering PCIe-based portable external drives that use Thunderbolt 3. The 40 gigabit per second bandwidth offered by the connection, as well as the high performance of the PCIe controller and included memory, makes such devices ideal for those needing extremely fast storage, such as for video editors storing projects and needing to access files quickly without first transferring them to the host computer.