Review: Orico K5Mini-VB magnetic portable SSD

Review sample provided by Orico

The Orico K5Mini-VB is one of many Magsafe magnetic portable SSDs from the company.

I've reviewed the Orico BookDrive P10Plus (left) and Orico K20 Mini recently and those two SSDs are both better than the Orico K5Mini-VB.

Price of this SSD at the time of review is USD 124 for the model with 1TB storage.

Included in the box are the SSD, a magnetic ring attachment, 10Gbps USB-C cable and user guide.

The magnetic ring attachment can be used to make any phone or phone case MagSafe compatible.

The SSD is designed to be used with iPhones since it's MagSafe compatible. Colours available for the SSD are orange, dark blue and silver.

The case is made with aluminium alloy and is lightweight. The SSD barely adds any weight when attached to a phone.

Due to the extra thickness, most phone grips will not be able to hold the phone with the SSD together. If you're using a phone cage for recording video, the phone cage will need some allowance for the USB-C cable that comes out form the side.

The USB-C cable is quite thick and flexible, looks durable. At the bottom of the SSD is a blue light activity indicator.

Transfer speed is advertised as 5Gbps which is 625MB/s.

To test the transfer speed, I've used the Blackmagic Disk Speed Test app on my Macbook Pro and have the test run for 10 minutes.

During the first few minutes, the read and write speed can be above 300MB/s each, but after sometime, the write speed would drop to 110 - 120MB/s.

Before the speed throttle, the speed is fast enough to record Apple ProRes HDR 30FPS. Recording Apple ProRes videos would create huge file sizes so I don't think this SSD is fast enough for that purpose, and there's also the issue of it not being able to maintain high transfer speed after a period of time.

In short, this is not a SSD I would use to record Apple ProRes videos. It's risky because you do not want a scenario where you cannot record due to the lack of transfer speed. I've tested the SSD by recording ProRes HDR 120FPS and there would be a warning pop-up that mentions the lack of transfer speed.

The Orico K5Mini-VB SSD is probably most suited for use as a simple external storage device. I won't recommend this for recording Apple ProRes videos. If you want faster SSDs, just go with the Orico BookDrive P10Plus and Orico K20 Mini.

Availability

The Orico K5Mini-VB is available from Amazon USA.