The latest unit from Orico on the review bench is the iFolder Go External SSD.
External drives are plentiful on the market, but for one, the Orico iFolder has a pretty eye catching design.
Rather than your run of the mill slab, the Orico iFolder looks more like a book. Assembled with an aluminium and plastic chassis, it is curved on the left side with a little cut out of the metal chassis to give it a little flair.
True to DRN colours, my review unit is in the Cosmic Orange colourway, and it is vibrant and gorgeous in person.
Aside from that, it really is just an external SSD drive with a USB connector.
In the packaging, Orico has provided a short flat USB-C to USB-C cable as well as a wrist strap.
The specs calls for up to 460 MB/s transfer speeds.
My testing using USBDeview gives the best write speed around 140 MB/Sec and read speed at just over 410 MB/sec.
However with a bit of real life testing, a 3.3GB folder of mixed sized files took under 10 seconds to transfer in Windows 11, with a sustained speed of around 180 MB/Sec.
Four copies of the same mixed sized files totally about 13.5GB gave a better sustained speed of around 350 MB/Sec for longer, until it fell away to hover around 60 MB/Sec.
But copying 15GB of data in 3 files saw write speed burst to 380 MB/Sec for a period of time before dropping off to a sustain sub-80 MB/Sec throughput.
Over all, the write speed isn’t going to excite anyone. But at the same time, the Orico iFolder Go does not require a remortgage to buy.
The additional advantage of the Orico iFolder Go is that it comes preformatted with an exFAT partition. This means seamless compatibility with Windows, macOS, Android and iOS out of the box.
I could plug it into my Android phone and its work immediately, no need to fiddle around. For the record I use CX File Explorer.
It was actually particularly useful for when I needed to copy a batch of camera footage off my phone. All I needed to do was to plug in the iFolder Go and just share it over to the drive. It reduces some of the friction of what I normally do.
Final Verdict: Should You Buy the Orico iFolder Go?
Who is the Orico iFolder Go for?
Casual users needing some space on their devices, students, mobile content creators would benefit from having a 1TB portable SSD on hand.
But for users that need sustained high write speeds or 1GB/s+ performance? This is not the drive you are looking for.
The Orico iFolder Go External SSD has 1Tb of capacity, and is currently available from Amazon for A$159.99. I do really like the look of it, and the Cosmic Orange colourway will go very nicely with the orange iPhone. Alternatively there is also a Silver colourway if bright colours is not your style.
And if you think that the design looks like a folder icon … you aren’t wrong there!
DRN would like to thank Orico for providing the review unit.
