It’s surprising that Panasonic launches external SSD and even more surprised when this drive is compatible with high-speed Thunderbolt 3. This drive is called Thunderbolt 3 Compact Lightweight Portable SSD, comes in two storage options: 512GB and 1TB, high-speed access, shock resistant housing, while the price has not been released yet.
The Panasonic SSD comes with a high-speed data transfer speed: a reading of up to 1500 MB / s and writing a maximum of 1000 MB / s. Anodized aluminum casing, measures 102 x 40 x 14.4 mm, weight 90 grams, but could shockproof, Panasonic said that can drop from 76 cm but unharmed.
Inside the SSD is the Intel Alpine Ridge Thunderbolt 3 microcontroller, a Phen3 NVMe 1.2 microprocessor supporting PCIe 3.0 x2 interface and Toshiba’s TLC BiCS3 256 GB chip. So with the dual lane PCIe 3.0, the maximum bandwidth of this SSD can be about 1.97GB / s instead of the full 4GB / s as the M.2 PCIe 3.0 x4 NVMe drives. It is about 4 times faster than USB 3.1 SSD since eXFAT is adopted as format, it is possible to use the cable by simply connecting it to a PC with Thunderbolt 3 interface.
Personally, We think that the price of this Panasonic Thunderbolt 3 Compact Lightweight Portable SSD will not be cheap because Panasonic usually shaping the product for his computer in the premium segment and the more reason when Panasonic advertising this SSD along with the Toughbook CF- SV7 is priced more than $4000.
