TerraMaster D1 SSD Pro review: A very fast, thermally stellar 80Gbps enclosure

Best Prices Today: TerraMaster D1 SSD Pro 80Gbps

TerraMaster’s 80Gbps D1 SSD Pro gave OWC’s mighty 1M2 80G a run for its money performance-wise, even besting that rival in several tests. Its massive cooling fins also make it one of the coolest-running 80Gbps SSDs I’ve tested. It’s on the pricey side, but hey, you pay for the latest, greatest tech.

Read on to learn more, then see our roundup of the best external drives for comparison.

What are the D1 SSD Pro’s features?

The D1 SSD Pro is an 80Gbps external SSD enclosure supporting all flavors of USB from 2.x (excluding 3.2×2, which is treated as 10Gbps 3.2) through 80Gbps USB4, as well as Thunderbolt 3/4/5.

The enclosure is rather massive, even compared to the previously reviewed and somewhat bulky D1 SSD Plus. Approximately 4.75-inches long by 2.4-inches wide by 1.5-inches thick. A lot of the thickness is due to the copious radiator fins on both the top and bottom of the unit.

As for the radiator fins, they allow the D1 SSD Pro to perform without throttling if the drive inside gets too hot, yet without the noise a fan might generate. Such white noise doesn’t bother me an iota, but I know there are those that hate it. Opt for a finned design in that case.

There’s a single Type-C port on one end of the unit, and a tiny power/activity light sitting just above it. The all-aluminum enclosure makes for a rather hefty paperweight at 10.5-ounces, though it’s missing the anti-skid rubber strips on the D1 SSD Plus. As a result, the D1 SSD Pro slides around a smooth surface a bit too readily for my taste. A minor deal to be sure, but an odd omission.

I rarely mention packaging, but the D1 SSD Pro ships with a classy, zippered hard shell carrying case. Inside I found a shorty 6-inch Type-C cable that was labeled as 80Gbps. Alas, said cable actually only allowed 40Gbps operation and I had to switch to another cable I had on hand to complete testing. Test yours and alert the company if you don’t see an 80Gbps connection.

Note that you can find the speed of your USB4/Thunderbolt connection in the latest Windows 11 under Settings/Bluetooth & Devices/USB4/USB4 hubs and devices. Under macOS it’s found under System Settings/About/System Report/Thunderbolt/USB4.

How much is the D1 SSD Pro?

Apparently, 80Gbps (in this early adopter phase), still carries a hefty premium. The D1 SSD Pro retails for a substantial $250. That’s $50 more than the unpopulated version of competing OWC 1M2 80Gbps. Note that the 1M2 80Gbps was not available sans drive at the time I reviewed it for Macworld.

How does the D1 SSD Pro perform?

Once we replaced the cable limiting the D1 SSD Pro to 40Gbps, all was hunky-dory with the drive. Hunky-dory to the tune of a very close 2nd-place finish to the mighty OWC 1M2, which it actually outpaced in several tests. It severely outclassed the LaCie Rugged SSD Pro5 (a much smaller, more portable drive) performance-wise

Keep in mind that the NVMe SSDs inside the compared models had a lot to do with the results. Change them, and the numbers might be different. The D1 SSD Pro arrived unpopulated, and I filled that void with a Corsair MP700 Pro XT — a very fast PCIe 5.0 SSD. The OWC had one of the company’s own Aura Ultra IV’s — a very fast PCIe 4.0 model.

The difference in PCIe generation had little to no effect as both 4.0 (roughly 7.5GBps real world) and 5.0 (roughly 14GBps real world) easily outstrip the capabilities of 80Gbs USB4/Thunderbolt 5 (around 7GBps maximum).

Caveats aside, the D1 SSD Pro took home the bacon in the CrystalDiskMark 8 sequential throughput tests.

The story changed with CrystalDiskMark 8’s 4K tests where the 1M2 bested the D1 SSD Pro by a fair margin.

In our 48GB transfers, the D1 SSD Pro was very fast, just not quite as fast as the OWC 1M2.

Though only slightly off the OWC 1M2’s 450GB write pace, the D1 SSD Pro again finished in second place.

As I said, the SSD you choose to populate an external enclosure can alter the enclosure’s performance. But forget PCIe 3.0 (if you can even find one these days) for the D1 SSD Pro, it will relegate performance to the 40Gbps level. But any decent PCIe 4.0/5.0 NVMe, host memory buffer or DRAM (pricier) should realize the D1 SSD Pro’s full potential. All this goes for any 80Gbps enclosure.

As I touted the copious radiator fins, I should report that the D1 SSD Pro ran only slightly warm to the touch, and never showed a hint of slowing down under sustained heavy loads. Cool.

Should you buy the TerraMaster D1 SSD Pro?

If you want a very fast external SSD that’s quiet, but won’t thermally throttle during heavy use, then the D1 SSD Pro is definitely worth checking out. If you like the style, go for it. After careful comparison shopping, of course.

How we test

Our storage tests currently utilize Windows 11 (22H2) 64-bit running on a Z790 (PCIe 5.0) motherboard/i5-12400 CPU combo with two Kingston Fury 32GB DDR5 modules (64GB of memory total). Intel integrated graphics are used. The 48GB transfer tests utilize an ImDisk RAM disk taking up 58GB of the 64GB total memory. The 450GB file is transferred from a Samsung 990 Pro 2TB, which also contains the operating system.

Each test is performed on a newly formatted and TRIM’d drive so the results are optimal. Note that as any drive fills up, performance will decrease due to less NAND for secondary caching, and other factors.

The performance numbers shown apply only to the drive we were shipped as well as the capacity tested. SSD performance can vary by capacity due to more or fewer chips to read/write across and the amount of NAND available for secondary caching (writing TLC/QLC as SLC). Vendors also occasionally swap components. If you ever notice a large discrepancy between the performance you experience and that which we report (systems being roughly equal), by all means — let us know.