News Western Digital shows off world’s first 8 TB 20 Gbps portable SSD at CES 2020

So its 2000 megabytes/s? Very fast for an external SSD but still slower than internal NVMe drives.

20 Gigabits / 8 = 2.5 Gigabytes or 2500 Megabytes per second.

PCI-E 3.0 x4 (3940 Megabytes per second without overhead) is indeed faster than 2500 Megabytes per second.

But for transferring files between computers a portable SSD sure beats

  1. Shutdown computer
  2. Open case
  3. Connect drive
  4. Boot up the computer
  5. Transfer files
  6. Shutdown computer
  7. Disconnect drive
  8. Close case
Assuming you were transferring terabytes of data and 10 gigabit Ethernet or faster wasn't available.

Even though 20 gigabits is twice as fast as 10 gigabit Ethernet you would still need to write the data to the SSD and then copy the data from the SSD to the new computer, which is effectively the same time as copying the data once from computer to computer with 10 gigabit Ethernet.
You also have the added downtime of physically moving the portable SSD from computer to computer.
 
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