GoKawiilThe voracious hardware demands on AI hyperscalers have been driving up prices (and driving down availability) of all kinds of PC hardware for half a year now. If you’re after a new external SSD, prices have so far nearly doubled from their all-time lows. But compared to the price of RAM, an RTX 5090, or an internal SSD, spending 70-80% more for external storage than you would have paid this time last year is a relative bargain.
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And if you do need a new external drive, you might want to buy one soon. Because new drive launches in 2026 seem to be few and far between, as we should expect given the current demands on the supply of flash storage. And it seems likely that the few companies that are launching new external drives may be having to make do with some… less-than-ideal NAND. Exhibit A: Take a look at the sustained writes from this Orico drive I recently reviewed .
In our real-world file transfer test, it was at least in the range of other drives of its class.
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(Image credit: Tom's Hardware)
But when it comes to sustained write speeds, the results were the worst I’ve seen for any SSD since I started testing external storage for Tom’s Hardware. We use Iometer to hammer the SSD with sequential writes for 15 minutes to measure the size of the write cache and performance after the cache is saturated.
(Image credit: Tom's Hardware)
Keep in mind that we tested a 512GB review sample, so the faster SLC cache will be larger on higher-capacity models. But if and when you do enough fast writing to hit the native NAND speed, you are looking at writes in the 60-80 MB/s range – with occasional dips below 50 MB/s.
This performance was so low that I reached out to Orico to make sure this was the expected speed and we weren’t dealing with a faulty drive. A representative told me that, while higher-capacity models would have more SLC cache and perform slightly better overall, “the product is functioning normally and there are no quality issues.”
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