TeamGroup’s T-Force Treasure Touch External RGB SSD ($148.99 for the 1TB drive tested) is a beautifully designed portable drive geared toward gamers, replete with an RGB lighting stripe around the edges and enough storage to stash a host of the latest space-hogging games. Built on Serial ATA-based innards, though, it’s pricey for the raw speeds that it serves back, outpaced by external USB models constructed around PCI Express drive components. Look past that, though, and this SSD is a head-turner on any desk.
Clever Design, RGB Flair
You can use the drive with desktop and laptop computers, of course, but TeamGroup also touts the Treasure Touch’s wide compatibility with gaming consoles. With this 1TB drive (the only capacity currently available), you should be able to stuff in more than a dozen AAA games, and load them from the drive. This gives console gamers a welcome boost in the number of games they can have readily at hand.
Clad in a black, brushed-metal chassis that is textured but smooth-feeling (and surprisingly fingerprint-resistant), the Treasure Touch measures 0.5 by 3.4 by 2.7 inches and weighs 3.7 ounces. The top of the drive sports a silver-colored T-Force logo, and imprinted on the bottom of the drive are its capacity, various certifications in minuscule type, and a QR code that takes you to the main TeamGroup page.
While the drive’s short ends are straight, the top and bottom are made of a single piece of metal curled back on itself, with the side a continuous curve. The other long side houses the LED, which I grew to think of as an RGB racing stripe. It runs the length of the drive and is roughly a sixteenth of an inch thick. (More on the lighting shortly.)
On one end of the Treasure Touch is a USB Type-C connector. The drive includes a USB-C-to-USB-A cable with an attached A-to-C adapter, so it can plug into either a USB-C or USB-A port on a computer.
Once you plug the drive into a computer, the light show begins. By tapping on, or near, the T-Force logo, you can cycle through a series of patterns. The light can shine in either a solid color (white, green, blue, and yellow among them) or a marquee of rainbow colors. (Of all the patterns, I liked the rainbow best.) You can also turn the RGB lighting off, which is something you can’t do with the recently reviewed ADATA SE900G External SSD without unplugging the drive. (Technically speaking, when you tap to turn off the Treasure Touch’s lighting, you can still see a faint blue glow from the tip of the LED nearest the port.)
I encountered one issue with the RGB lighting: At times, it simply would not respond to my taps. There is an explanation for this, which I found on TeamGroup’s Treasure Touch page: “If there is interference from surrounding electrical appliances during use, it may cause temporary failure. Please power on again before using.” Most of the time, I test products at my desk, which is near my TV, router, set-top box, and monitor. Often nearby are my phone, a tablet, and a second laptop, as well, though most of them are dormant at any given time. When I moved my laptop and the Treasure Touch away from all this potential noise, the RGB worked as it should. However, a few times when I was away from any known source of electrical interference, the control over the lighting still fritzed out.
Overall, I was impressed by the Treasure Touch’s clever and attractive industrial design, and I’m not the only one who was. The company notes that this product won a 2021 Red Dot Design Award, a German international prize that has been awarded in a variety of categories for more than 65 years. TeamGroup covers the Treasure Touch with a three-year warranty, typical of SATA SSDs and general-purpose external drives.
A few words about what is not included with the Treasure Touch. It comes without software on it, and no software for it is shown on TeamGroup’s download page. Also, it doesn’t have any ruggedization features indicated by a spec such as an Ingress Protection (IP) rating. Then again, with gaming the action is usually done at home, and you probably don’t have to worry too much about exposing a drive used in that way to the elements.
Testing the Treasure Touch: Locked to SATA Standards
TeamGroup describes the Treasure Touch’s USB-C port as a USB 3.2 Gen 2 connector. When paired with such a port, some drives (those built on innards with a PCI Express bus pushing data to the USB interface) have sequential read/write speed ratings of up to 1,050MBps read and 1,000MBps write. The Treasure Touch, which uses an internal drive based the slower Serial ATA (SATA), is rated at up to only 400MBps for both read and write. While it exceeded its rated speeds in our best-case sequential read/write testing, it was outpaced by PCI Express-based drives we’ve tested over the same Gen 2 connector. (See more about how we test SSDs.)
In running the Crystal DiskMark 6.0 benchmark—which measures the transfer speeds for large, contiguous blocks of data—from our standard Windows 10 testbed over a USB 3.2 Gen 2 port, the Treasure Touch turned in sequential read/write scores of 539MBps read and 485MBps write. In write speed, it easily thumped two other SATA-based drives, both tested relatively recently, shown in our comparison chart, while turning in a respectable read speed. The Crucial X6 had a healthy 557MBps read score but a ho-hum 212MBps write speed. The HP Portable SSD P500 scored 420MBps for read and just 265MBps for write speeds. Both of these drives are for everyday, and not particularly demanding, use.
Moving on to PCI Express drives, the Editors’ Choice-award-winning WD My Passport SSD (2020), which also has some design cred, turned in read/write scores of 1,066MBps read and 954MBps write on Crystal DiskMark 6.0. Another Editors’ Choice pick, the semi-rugged SanDisk Extreme Portable SSD V2, scored 1,072MBps on reads and 1,044MBps on writes. Last, we tested the aforementioned (and also RGB-equipped) ADATA SE900G over a faster but hard-to-find USB 3.2 Gen 2×2 interface (rated for 20Gbps), where it turned in scores of 1,997MBps read and 2,000MBps write. Had we tested that ADATA drive over a USB 3.2 Gen 2 connection, it probably would have turned in speeds similar to those of the other PCI Express drives.
In the PCMark 10 Storage Test, which measures an SSD’s readiness to perform a wide variety of everyday tasks, the TeamGroup drive did much better. Its score of 1,146 effectively ties the ADATA SE900G, that speedster gaming drive. Overall, its score was in the middle of our comparison group and shows that for the everyday, basic tasks that the drive may be subjected to, the performance should be quite sufficient. Only in large and sustained file transfers does the SATA-versus-PCI Express peak-speed issue come to the fore.
SATA Speeds in a PCI Express World
The Treasure Touch, like the ADATA SE900G reviewed concurrently with it, is an external SSD geared to gamers, compatible with both computers and gaming consoles and decked out with an RGB LED light show. The Treasure Touch gets kudos for its compact design, brushed-metal finish, and the RGB glow. But while the SE900G is capable of very high sequential read/write speeds (albeit only over a connection precious few computers support), the Treasure Touch has to live on its looks, as it’s an external drive limited to SATA-style speeds in a market where PCI Express-based USB drives capable of much higher speeds abound.
Based on its current online-retailer pricing of 15 cents per gigabyte, the Treasure Touch is more expensive than the other SATA-based drives compared here, with the Crucial X6 selling for 10 cents per gigabyte and the HP P500 for 12 cents a gig (both in their comparable 1TB versions). You do pay a premium for the Treasure Touch’s nifty metal, illuminated design. It has the same current pricing as the WD My Passport SSD (2020), and the SanDisk Extreme V2 costs just a penny more per gig, as does the ADATA SE900G.
The Treasure Touch’s premium price may not fetch you top-shelf speed, but it gains you a great conversation piece. The touch-controlled RGB lighting is pretty—just don’t be surprised if the control function works sporadically. And know that the drive proper is built on slower core technology, while the many PCI Express-based drives around it can take full advantage of USB 3.2 Gen 2 ports. If you’re sold on the RGB angle, consider that for just a little more money, you could get the faster-rated 1TB ADATA SE900G and its beautiful (if not interactive) RGB lighting.
