Angelbird SSD2Go Dual External USB3 DUAL SSD Unboxing & Overview
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2014-05-07
·
1,300 words · ~6 min read
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this video is brought to you by the Intel Core i5 4670k unlocked processor
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add an Intel 520 series SSD to your Haswell system for unbelievable overall
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performance welcome to an a very excited
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unboxing of the Angel Bird ssd2 go now I
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can pretty much guarantee you that you've never heard of this product
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because I'd never heard of it and well okay maybe you've heard of it but I've
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never heard of it it is an external SSD
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solution so external storage solution that it's well it's been a long time
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since I've encountered an external storage Solution that's really taken me
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aback and kind of going oh lonus no there's something you haven't seen yet
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so inside the box I find I don't I don't know if actual retail units come with
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all this but I've got a couple of different usb3 cables what you'll notice
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that's unique about these right off the Hop is that they're a TOA cables so okay
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you can already tell there's probably something a little bit different about this drive there's also two more of them
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so these are white and I guess possibly
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different lengths I have I have no idea apparently yep these are these are
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longer cables all right so the SSD to go
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has a very very unique Design This is the twin well why don't we start with
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sort of common features so it has a sandforce based SSD storage solution
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okay so sandforce based SSD that's cool next up it has a built-in 4 second UPS
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so what that means is in the event of some kind of uh power loss or other sort
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of C catastrophic failure the built-in
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UPS will allow it to flush the cach that's one of the reasons they used
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sandforce controller based drives inside here because if you had a a controller
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that used a very large cache then what would happen is in the event of a power
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loss there might not be time to flush the data from the cash to the drive
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itself and that might result in some data loss and holy crap this is one of
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those products where you hold it and you go yeah that feels like quality each SSD
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to go is crafted out of a single block of the highest quality aluminum
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according to Angel bird and I'm inclined to agree with them at this point because
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it is absolutely fantastic and the twin model you can get them in a variety of
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colors I actually requested that the twin that I got be purple and black so
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it's in a in a combined sort of color combo that looks really really cool and
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what you'll notice okay so right so the UPS all that good stuff um sorry about
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that I was actually just too odd by the
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manufacturing quality uh designer manufactured in Austria so this means
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that I'm now officially a fanboy of at least two companies that are based in
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Austria the other being Noctua which as you guys know make my favorite fans ever
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um okay so one of the other advantages of the design that they've gone with
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here with the aluminum housing is that it keeps the drive nice and cool so
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angel birds quoting anywhere from a 32° to 40° operating temperature meaning
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that you can use this thing anywhere that you can take it and based on how
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it's built I think you can take it pretty much anywhere remember guys that
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the things that cause flash cells to degrade are rights so they have a fixed
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number of rights that they can handle as well as temperatures high operating
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temperatures will make your ssds degrade faster over time so the regular non-twin
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Drive is just one of these and the twin as you can well imagine is a twined
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version of it now the first thing you're going to notice about it is what in the heck lineus it has two interfaces the
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reason for that and the reason that I requested this drive specifically is
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because for my needs this is perfect you
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can get it with any number of different capacities so 120 240 or 480 gig
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individual or dual drives and what I'm going to be using it for is safe rugged
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durable redundant storage we're going to computex and we're going to need to
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store a lot of data that I don't want to
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keep keep on a hard drive inside a computer because I don't trust them at
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all and I want to be nice and fast for external
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transfers which is where this comes in but I don't want to risk a bar losing it
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I don't want to risk any kind of a data loss that's caused by a drop or a fall
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so that's where SST comes in and finally because these are fully redundant they
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have their own individual uh data sources they have their own individual
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power supplies completely their own dedicated circuitry I don't even have to
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worry about one of them just sort of outright dying randomly I will still
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have all of my data so I'm going for a redundant storage solution where I can
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just plug them and the other cool thing is that because USB 3 is going to be
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pretty much tapped Out by the there we
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go by the transfer speeds of a sand Force based SSD what's cool about having
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two separate interfaces to it is that you can actually take advantage of the full transfer speeds to both of the
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individual drives assuming ass uming that you've got full 5 gbit per second
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from two different ports on your board which is possible because many boards
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have multiple usb3 chipsets built into them now another use case scenario for
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this is if you wanted to use it as like a boot drive and a data storage drive so
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they've heard of custo or Angel bird has had customers ordering these with like a
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120 gig Drive in one side and a 480 in the other side so they can actually run
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their OS off of it and then run their uh
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run their programs or run their storage or mastor or whatever else off of a
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separate one I think the real story with this is just the overall fit and finish
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of it I mean it's um I've never seen an external drive quite like this the
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anization is immaculate um wow very beautiful I think
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that pretty much wraps it up I will be giving you guys a full impression of
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what it's like to use the SSD to go once we get back from computex so do stay
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tuned for that but I can already tell you I'm pretty stoked on this don't forget to subscribe to lus Tech tips for
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more unboxings reviews other computer videos and I think something like this
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wouldn't be complete without my trademark phone comparison so there it
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is next to an HTC1 and as you'll be able to see very
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shortly once I get the nod from NG that we've got a good shot of that is that it
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is significantly thicker than HTC1 so maybe not really intended to be kept in
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your pocket unless you want people asking you how happy you are to see them
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but something that you could easily keep in a bag