VisionTek 120GB USB 3.0 Pocket SSD Drive Review

By Nathan Kirsch

Final Thoughts & Conclusions

VisionTek USB 3.0 Pocket SSD Cap

The VisionTek USB 3.0 Pocket SSD is certainly one of the fastest USB 3.0 Flash drives on the market today. The drive isn’t the most visually appealing on the market, but the aluminum housing is held together with three screws and gives you the feeling that it can take a beating and come out alive. The rubber cap design isn’t the slickest that we’ve seen, but it works and chances are pretty high that it will get lost anyway. Overall performance was found to be pretty solid once you keep in mind that this drive used the SandForce SF-2281 controller.

Like all SF-2281 driven products, the VisionTek USB 3.0 Pocket SSD performs best with compressible data. This is because the SF-2281 controller features DuraWrite technology. SandForce DuraWrite architecture reduces the amount of data written to the NAND flash memory inside solid state drives (SSDs) for longer effective endurance and higher performance. This data compression also plays a big part in the controller’s performance and the more the data can be the compressed, the faster this SSD can run. The AS SSD Compression-Benchmark test shows how important compression is to a drive like the VisionTek USB 3.0 Pocket SSD. You can see a considerable performance difference between incompressible (0%) and compressible (100%) data.

visiontek compression

When it comes to pricing the VisionTek USB 3.0 Pocket SSDs are priced a bit higher than we expected.

As a result they have a number of drives to compete with. For example at the 240-250GB capacity range the Pocket SSD will be facing off against drives like the Samsung T1 Portable (review) that runs $179.99 shipped. The overall size of the Samsung T1 is slightly larger, but it weighs less, has a longer warranty, comes with AES 256-bit encryption software and is hands down faster in the performance tests. You also have drives like the Mushkin Ventura Ultra 240GB that is very similar and costs just $131.89 shipped. Mushkin did not respond to our e-mail about what the differences are between the Mushkin Ventura Ultra and the VisionTek Pocket SSD, but VisionTek did. VisionTek specified they use Tier 1 NAND Flash in their drives and that they have better thermal performance, so they are claiming that they use better components and put more thought into the thermal performance of the drive.

At the end of the day the VisionTek USB 3.0 Pocket SSD was found to offer SSD-like performance in a USB 3.0 drive that is easily portable. The VisionTek Pocket SSD works as advertised and if you like what you see then give it a shot. We enjoyed using it as a portable OS drive for Windows 8.1 and will keep trying to get Windows 10 installed on it!

Legit Bottom Line: The VisionTek USB 3.0 Pocket SSD shows that you can indeed get SSD-like performance in a USB 3.0 drive that can easily fit in your pocket!