Orico iMatch IV300 portable hard drive is a little ripper (review)

Orico iMatch IV300
Reader Rating0 Votes
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9.4

The Orico iMatch IV300 is a 1 terabyte external USB-C NVMe solid state hard drive (SSD) for USB-C 3.1 Gen 2 (10Gbps) or earlier devices. Is it fast? Try over 1Gigabyte per second.

We have written about ORICO before. Its GV1000 NVMe SSD 4.1/5 also blitzed our speed tests. The new ORICO IV300 packs twice the capacity into a smaller unit.

Speaking of speed – as you will see below, it is excellent with larger files. ORICO has also solved the issue of occasional hangs with Thunderbolt that was due to an earlier controller on the GV1000.

Review: ORICO iMatch IV300 portable NVMe SSD

  • Website here
  • Amazon official AU site here
  • Size/Price: 500GB ($139.99) and 1TB ($219.99) free delivery
  • Warranty: 3-year warranty via Amazon
  • Country of manufacture: China
  • ORICO is a well-known and respected Chinese manufacturer of peripherals and digital accessories. It has a focus on storage, USB adapters and chargers
Orico iMatch IV300

Base specs

  • Model: ORICO iMatch IV300
  • Case: Aluminum alloy
  • Dimension: 68.8 (L) x 32 (W) x 10.4 ( H) mm
  • Weight: 38g plus 11g cable
  • Colours: Black, Silver, China Blue, China Red
  • Control chip: JMS583 A2 revision bridge chip (10Gbps)
  • Interface: UASP NVMe USB-C 3.1 Gen2 (10Gbps)
  • Supports TRIM
  • Storage: 3D NAND FLASH, M.2 NVMe SSD
  • Capacity: 250GB / 500GB / 1TB
  • Supported: Windows, Mac OS, Linux, Android
  • In the box: Drive, USB-C to USB-C Cable and USB-A to USB-A cable
  • Supports a small lanyard
Orico iMatch IV300

Who will use it?

I will for starters – 1TB in a minuscule 38g size. But as it breaks the 1Gbps barrier, it is fast enough for 4K videographers, photographers, drone operators and more to attach to their camera or drone and give them an extra TB of storage. Our use it for rendering, although that is best with internal SSDs that can reach 3000Mbps.

Speed Gen 2
This is fast but the host device needs USB-C 3.1 or 3.2 and Gen 2 to achieve it

We were impressed that it has good large file speeds. A separate 10GB file transfer to (write), and read back from; it achieved a solid 350MBps write and 800MBps read. This puts it ahead of the Samsung T7 and SanDisk Extreme Pro. We ran a ‘silly’ write test to see when the buffer would overflow and found that a file size around 50GB slowed it down. We discovered that Orico builds in a safety thermal throttle at about 50GB or 50°.

Speed Gen 1
This is still fast – on a USB-C 3.1 Gen 1 device.

GadgetGuys take – Orico iMatch IV300 is impressive

As it is USB-C 3.1 Gen 2, it may not work on some older ARM devices, and iPhone is OUT – test it first. It does work on Samsung Galaxy S10 or later. Fear not, it is backwards compatible and will achieve Gen 1 (5Gbps) – about half speed as above.

Features
9
Value for money
8.6
Performance
9.6
Ease of Use
9.6
Design
10
Reader Rating0 Votes
0
Positives
Small
Fast
Orico quality fit and finish
Negatives
No AES256 encryption
9.4