Glyph Atom EX40 review: Rugged, portable 40Gbps USB4 storage

I was impressed with the Glyph Atom EX40 from the minute I took it out of the box. It’s a looker, and its random and real-world performance were top-notch. Alas, it ain’t cheap, though with the current high price of NAND it’s looking almost like a bargain.

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

What are the Glyph Atom EX40’s features?

The black and dark gray, aluminum-bodied Atom EX40 measures around 4.5-inches long, but 2.8-inches wide, by 0.8-inches thick. Weight is about 10 ounces. It’s no lightweight, but I personally like a bit of heft to my gear — the feel of quality and all that.

The Atom EX40 is a 40Gbps USB4 SSD, as the label next to the Type-C port clearly spells out (see the image below). Glyph bundles a 7-inch (including the connectors) Type-C to Type-C cable, and thankfully, I had no issues with it as I did with the Atom EX20’s.

The Atom EX40 carries a three-year warranty, and two of those years include free data recovery — very unusual for a boutique storage vendor.

There’s no stated TBW rating (terabytes that may be written under warranty) for the EX40, but 600TBW is the industry norm. The chances of the average end-user writing even that much data within a decade are slim to none. Videographers, maybe.

How much does the Glyph Atom EX40 cost?

Hang onto your hats, folks, it’s a wild financial ride to owning an SSD these days. Two months ago, the EX40 would’ve looked pricey indeed. Now? $390 for 1TB, $500 for 2TB, $850 for 4TB, and $1,700 for 8TB don’t look half bad.

With NAND/SSD prices so high, the price delta between the various bus speeds has become far less significant. In other words, if you’re going to spend massively for an SSD, you might want to get the fastest stuff available.

That said, 80Gbps SSDs, while benchmarking much faster, don’t quite deliver the real world performance jump that you get with 20Gbps over 10Gbps, or 40Gbps over 20Gbps.

How fast is the Glyph Atom EX40?

The Atom EX40’s performance is excellent. If you read my review of the 20Gbps Atom EX20, you know that I had issues with the included cable. The EX40 shipped with what looked like an identical cable, but had no issues. Go figure. Firmware? Handshaking?

The Atom EX40, while not superb in CrystalDiskMark 8’s sequential tests, turned in very impressive 4K and real-world transfer times. Thanks to the latter, it ranked as the fastest pre-populated 40Gbps overall that I’ve tested.

The EX40 was slower than only the TerraMaster D1 enclosure with a Corsair MP700 Pro installed, and the Ugreen CM850 enclosure, in which I installed an equally fast WD SN850X.

Note that when I refer to a product as an enclosure, it means it ships unpopulated, without a drive inside.

While it wasn’t great under CrystalDiskMark 8 with sequential transfers, the Atom EX40 turned in some stellar CDM 8 4K numbers.

Here you can see some of the aforementioned good results in real-world transfers. The Atom EX40 wasn’t fastest in every 48GB transfer, but it was in some, and certainly in the hunt during the others.

A very fast 450GB write time using FastCopy is what really propelled the Atom EX40 to its high placement in the overall rankings.

In total, I’m sure you’ll be pleased with the Atom EX40’s performance. It also sheds heat well under load, despite the silicone jacket.

Should you buy the Glyph Atom EX40?

The answer to this question would be yes if you can afford it or any SSD at this point. Rolling your own with an enclosure was cheaper at the time of this writing, but bare NVMe SSD prices are rising rapidly so that may not be the cheaper option for long.

Price aside, the Glyph Atom EX40 is handsome, rugged, and fast. You won’t be disappointed.

How we test

Drive tests currently utilize Windows 11 24H2, 64-bit running off of a PCIe 4.0 Samsung 990 Pro in an Asus Z890-Creator WiFi (PCIe 4.0/5.0) motherboard. The CPU is a Core Ultra i5 225 feeding/fed by two Crucial 64GB DDR5 5600MHz modules (128GB of memory total).

Both 20Gbps USB and Thunderbolt 5 are integrated into the motherboard and Intel CPU/GPU graphics are used. Internal PCIe 5.0 SSDs involved in testing are mounted in an Asus Hyper M.2 x16 Gen5 adapter card sitting in a PCIe 5.0 slot.

We run the CrystalDiskMark 8.04 (and 9), AS SSD 2, and ATTO 4 synthetic benchmarks (to keep article length down, we report only the first) to find the storage device’s potential performance. Then we run a series of 48GB transfer and 450GB write tests using Windows Explorer drag and drop to show what users will see during routine copy operations, as well as the far speedier FastCopy run as administrator to show what’s possible.

A 25GBps two-SSD RAID 0 array on the aforementioned Asus Hyper M.2 x16 Gen5 is used as the second drive in our transfer tests. Formerly the 48GB tests were done with a RAM disk serving that purpose.

Each test is performed on a NTFS-formatted and newly TRIM’d drive so the results are optimal. Note that in normal use, as a drive fills up, performance may decrease due to less NAND for secondary caching, as well as other factors. This issue has abated somewhat with the current crop of SSDs utilizing more mature controllers and far faster, late-generation NAND.