The advent of 3D TLC flash and high-speed interfaces such as USB 3.1 Gen 2 and Thunderbolt 3 has resulted in a number of economical high-performance direct-attached storage devices in the market. These are essentially SATA or PCIe SSDs behind a SATA - USB 3.1 Gen 2 bridge or a Thunderbolt 3 controller. SATA SSDs behind a USB bridge are budget-friendly. Yet, the performance is quite good for the average consumer workload (particularly those sporting a USB 3.1 Gen 2 bridge). Today, we will take a detailed look at the 1TB variants of two such products - the Seagate Fast SSD and the SanDisk Extreme Portable SSD.