ORICO ‎R3700 Portable SSD Review: A Super-fast but Poorly Designed Portable SSD

When it comes to storage devices, there are brand-name products like one of these. And then there are a myriad of lesser-known, even sketchy, options that might make you wonder if they are worth the low costs.

Case in point: the ORICO R3700 RGB Portable SSD, which I decided to test. It proved to be an interesting experience.

Here's the bottom line: At the current street price, which starts at about $170 for 1TB, the ORICO R40 can be an excellent buy if you want a super-fast USB4-based drive. However, its esoteric design is also a testament to the fact that, generally, you get what you pay for.

ORICO R3700 RGB Portable SSD: A fast storage device stunted by poor design

If you look at ORICO's Amazon store, you'll note that the drive is listed as ORICO Portable SSD, among many other options of the same name.

The R3700 model name is printed on its label, suggesting that the drive has a top speed of up to 3700MB/s. ORICO later confirmed that with me. That's important because elsewhere, it's listed with the R40 model name.

As for hardware specs, based on ORICO's description, you might think this is a Thunderbolt drive. In reality, it features USB4 40Gbps. And the whole thing can be a bit of an issue.

ORICO R3700: The USB4 vs. Thunderbolt confusion

The way these peripheral standards work, any USB-C drive will work with Thunderbolt 3 (and newer) revisions.

However, it won't have all the features of Thunderbolt, such as the ability to deliver 40Gbps when connected to a Thunderbolt 4 port—Thunderbolt 4 only features USB4 20Gbps. To get real USB4 40Gbps, you need a motherboard that features this standard, and there's currently none.

That said, the only option to get USB4 40Gbps is via a PCIe add-on adapter, such as this Asus USB4 PCIe Gen4 Card, which doesn't work with just any motherboard.

The point is that there's currently no real option for USB4 40Gbps.

ORICO R3700: Hardware specifications

	ORICO R3700 RGB Portable SSD
Capacity	1TB, 2TB, 4TB
Internal Storage	PCIe Gen 4 4x4 NVMe SSD
Product Color	Silver
Dimensions	5.51 x 1.81 x .79 in (14 x 4.6 x 2 cm)
Weight	4.02 oz (114 g)
Copy Speed	Up to 3700 MB/s
Interface	USB40 40Gbps Type-C
Backward Compatibility (peripheral standards)	Thunderbolt 3 (and later) USB4 20Gbps USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 USB 3.2 Gen 2 USB 3.2 Gen 1 USB 2.0
Design	Full aluminum body, with large RGB color-changing light
Security	None
Power Usage	USB bus-powered  via a USB-C port
Package Content	R3700 Portable SSD  USB-C Cable with built-in USB-A adapter
Warranty	5-year
US Price (at launch)	$169.99 (1TB)  $249.99 (2TB) $399.99 (4TB) Buy now!

Bulky but convenient design

Out of the box, the R3700 appears to be a typical USB drive. It's a slender, relatively bulky piece of hardware with a USB-C port on one end.

On top, toward the other end, you'll find a large round LED RGB light. You might think it's a button or a finger scanner, but it's not—more on this light below.

The drive's chassis is made entirely of aluminum, with the top and bottom parts glued together with no screw—there's o way to open it up without causing damage or scratches. On the inside, per ORICO, it houses its J20 PCIe Gen4 SSD.

The drive includes a short USB-C cable with an attached USB-A adapter. Thus, you can use it right away with either port type.

It's worth noting that the whole package feels a bit cheap. For example, the marking on the cable or the drive itself seems easily peeled off, and the metal on the drive's body feels coarse.

Reformat required

The R3700 is not preformatted out of the box—you have to format it before you can use it, as you would when buying a new internal drive.

It's the first portable SSD I've used that requires formatting. All others tend to be already formatted in the exFAT file system.

This oversight is not a huge deal, considering it's super easy to format a drive. Still, it shows how the drive lacks the attention to the detail.

And it gets worse.

The noisy internal fan and annoying RGB lighting

The ORICO ‎R3700 has an internal fan, which is somewhat unusual for a bus-powered USB portable drive, especially one on its physical side.

This fan runs almost incessantly during operation and makes a subdued but noticeable high-pitch sound, enough to be distracting in a quiet room, though you likely won't notice it if you have a desktop computer—it's not loud enough to eclipse the computer's fan.

Speaking of distraction, the RGB lighting mentioned above turns on super bright the moment you plug the drive into a computer, then constantly cycles through different RGB shades similar to those on top of a police car. That was fun for the first few seconds, but it got old fast, especially when I found out there was no way to change the light's behavior or turn it off.

It's worth noting that this light has nothing to do with the drive's status or data activity. It turns on and does its same old routine on its own.

To make matters worse, the light doesn't follow the power status of the host computer, either. On a computer with the USB-charging feature, even when you turn the machine off and leave the drive plugged in, the light still flashes bright like there's no tomorrow. It's nuts.

During my testing, I had to put black tape on it to avoid driving myself crazy.

Mixed performance: Fast reading meets progressively slow writing

I tested and used the ORICO R3700 for a couple of days using a few computers with different USB standards. As mentioned above, there was no way to get a USB4 40Gbps computer, so Thunderbolt 4 is the fastest standard I have with my testbed running a ROG Maximus Z790 Formula motherboard.

As a result, it performs at USB4 20Gbps at most. But even then, it didn't come close to the standard's speed, especially in writing. That's not to say the R3700 was slow. In fact, it proved to be the fastest to date. However, its performance wasn't consistent.

While the drive consistently performed well in reading, its write performance degraded when handling a large chunk of data regardless of the port standard I used. The write speed started to get progressively lower, starting around the 5GB mark.

The more data wanted to be written at a sitting, the slower it became until it plateaued at around 300MB/s. But if you copy 50GB or less at a time, the drive can still be plenty fast. The charts above show how it performed when handling a 25GB test file.

Despite the fan, the ORICO R3700 became quite warm to the touch during heavy loads. However, it wasn't hot enough to cause serious concern about its longevity. On this front, ORICO's included 5-year warranty can serve as a reasonable assurance.

Conclusion

The ORICO R3700 RGB Portable SSD seems a bit of a tryhard. If it had a regular status light instead of the purposely ostentatious yet pointless RGB one, it would be simply a super-fast USB drive. As is, make sure you get a black tape with it, which wouldn't be a huge deal considering its relatively reasonable cost.

Consider one today!