on Sep 3rd, 2026,

The ADATA SD820 is a rugged yet lightweight portable SSD that's designed to come along with you on expeditions or travel overseas, for when you expect your portable storage to be able to take a beating. The drive can survive 4-foot drops, and has military-grade ratings to resist dust and be waterproof down to 1 meter for up to 60 minutes. It's surprisingly lightweight, tipping the scales at just under an ounce, although its stiff USB cable should add a bit more weight. The drive comes in 1 TB and 2 TB capacity variants. We have with us the 1 TB variant to review.

The SD820 was part of a dual product launch from ADATA. We reviewed its more compact sibling, the SC735 2 TB recently. The drive features a sporty appearance, with blue rubber accents that offer shock resistance. This drive features a 20 Gbps USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 interface, and its designers advertise sequential transfer speeds of up to 2 GB/s, saturating the interface. The drive owes its light weight to its USB-native SSD controller, the Silicon Motion SM2322G, which is paired with 3D QLC NAND flash memory from Micron.

ADATA advertises use-cases beyond personal computing, with compatibility tested for modern game consoles such as PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S, where you can use the SD820 as a game install drive, supplementing internal storage. The up to 2 GB/s of transfer speeds should make the drive sufficiently fast to run or install games on. The drive can also be connected to cameras or high-end smartphones for saving 4K Ultra HD video. The drive may not be recommended for serious video production use-cases but should be plenty for budding content creators.

The 1 TB variant of the ADATA SD820 we're reviewing today was spotted online for $195. We expect the 2 TB variant to be nearly double this.