Glyph Atom EX40 SSD Review: Excellent Performance

Earlier this year, memory brand Glyph debuted its new Atom EX SSDs with a specific focus on serving content creators. With Sandisk still refusing to publicly acknowledge the problems with its compact SSDs, I was pretty happy to see another brand step up and create something for photographers and filmmakers.

I get it: when a company says that a product is made specifically for any use case, it’s often at best 50% marketing. But still, seeing a company really focus on content creators is nice, especially when the benefits of the product are legitimately things that the audience cares about. Despite what many might think, there are differences between SSD brand A and SSD brand B when it comes to performance — we know it from our extensive conversations with memory manufacturers, and we see it in testing. Drives respond differently to workloads when their onboard controllers are manufactured with that use case in mind.

The “good” SSDs will work hard to maintain their peak read and write speeds regardless of how long you run them, how full of data they are, and how much you add to or delete from them. For filmmakers shooting tons of H.265 or ProRes HQ footage and mixing that in with high-resolution timelapse footage, that’s important. The last thing they want to see is extended render times or choppy playback due to the lackluster speed of access to a drive. For photographers, enough time is spent waiting for Lightroom to import and export as it is: very few are interested in making that wait time longer due to slow storage.

There is really only one other company that has been toeing the “consistency” line like this, and that’s ProGrade Digital with its PG10 SSD. Our testing confirms the company’s promise: no matter what you do to that drive, it’s going to hold steady at a pretty consistent pace. However, to get that consistency, ProGrade’s speeds took a hit, and the drive itself is massive.

Glyph seems to be making the same promises as ProGrade, but in a much more compact package and without that speed hit.

Before we get into the meat of this review, let’s talk price: the Glyph Atom EX40 comes in 1TB, 2TB, 4TB, and 8TB configurations that cost $389, $499, $849, and $1,699, respectively.

Glyph Atom EX40 SSD Review: Design and Build Quality

No SSD is really “attractive” to look at, but Glyph is particularly bland in this regard. The Atom EX40 is just a black metal rectangular block with a silicone bumper stretched around it. The whole affair is just larger than the palm of my hand (I don’t have particularly large hands, for what it’s worth), but it weighs more than you would think given the size. One end has a USB-C port on it and a small LED next to it that illuminates when it’s plugged into a computer.

That’s it.

Honestly, I’m good with that. I’m all for inventive designs, but at the end of the day, I’m jamming this block into my tech pouch, and I only care if the data on it is accessible, not if it catches eyes while I’m parked at a coffee shop.

What I find most interesting about this design is how it looks like it’s going to just be a thermal nightmare. Everything I’ve been led to believe about SSD design is broken by this little metal brick, especially since the many OWC drives I’ve been using over the last year all use a cutout fin design to help sink heat. So, a smooth rectangle of metal covered in silicone sounds like a thermal nightmare. But it’s somehow not.

Glyph says it uses a solid aluminum core and a second outer shell that have an increased thermal ceiling. This combination allows it to sink heat extremely well away from the internal components. I will say this results in the Atom EX40 getting warm to the touch nearly immediately upon being powered on, but that temperature basically never rises after that. Even after getting pounded with terabytes of data, the Atom EX40 just hung out at that slightly-warmer-than-body-temperature level. It also operates silently, which is great.

The Atom EX40 isn’t what I would call “rugged,” at least not like the dust and water-resistant drives that I’ve tested in the past, but it’s not fragile either. You’re going to want to keep water off it, but you shouldn’t worry about jostling it, getting dust on it, or even dropping it (from a reasonable desk height, anyway).

The aforementioned USB-C port is the latest 40Gbps USB-4, which is compatible with a huge range of ports on computers, including previous USB 3.0, USB 3.1, and Thunderbolt 3, 4, and 5.

Glyph Atom EX40 SSD Review: Performance

Glyph says its SSDs are designed to withstand actual, real-world use by content creators. That means it knows the drives aren’t just going to be used to store things on, they’re going to be worked off of. We hear a lot of claims when it comes to SSDs, so we always test them to see if those claims hold water.

PetaPixel’s SSD testing involves checking the speed of the SSD right out of the box, then filling the SSD to capacity and immediately checking the speed again. Finally, the drive is formatted, and the speed is checked a third time. What this test does is not only measure if an SSD can properly manage its heat (because filling a multi-terabyte drive generates a ton of it), but also if the onboard controller is able to properly maintain performance even when the drive has data written to it and deleted from it.

We’ve seen some SSDs really struggle with this. For example, the LaCie Rugged SSD Pro oscillates wildly when put under this strain, as does OWC’s older Envoy Pro FX SSD. OWC successfully fixed this issue with the Envoy Ultra, and it, along with the ProGrade PG10, were the two most consistent SSDs we had tested, with ProGrade’s being the best performer in the USB-4 space and OWC’s being the best in the Thunderbolt 5 space.

Glyph, however, has unseated ProGrade. Not only is it just as consistent (if not slightly more so), it is also almost twice as fast. While the ProGrade topped out at around 1,800 MB/s transfer speeds, the Glyph Atom EX40 cruises at north of 3,000 MB/s no matter how much data is on the drive or how hard we worked it.

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That means it is simultaneously the fastest and most consistent USB-4 SSD that PetaPixel has ever tested.

Here are the raw numbers:

• Fresh: Read Speed – 3055.5 MB/s
• Fresh: Write Speed – 3219.5 MB/s
• Full: Read Speed – 3120.1 MB/s
• Full: Write Speed – 3098 MB/s
• Emptied: Read Speed – 3114.6 MB/s
• Emptied: Write Speed – 3174.6 MB/s

Adding to my growing list of “that’s impressive” marks, the Atom EX40 manages these high-performance numbers while also being about half the physical dimensions of the ProGrade PG10. Our biggest knock against ProGrade’s SSD was its sheer size, which makes it difficult to travel with. By comparison, the Glyph Atom EX40 slips nicely into a travel kit.

The Glyph Atom EX40 SSD Is the Real Deal

When we reviewed the ProGrade PG10, we marveled at how rock-solid its performance was. It was so good we were willing to overlook the relatively middling speeds. Though we never expected it to come close to Thunderbolt speeds, we knew that USB-4 was capable of faster. We thought we had to make a choice between speed and consistency.

Glyph has thrown that assumption out the window.

While Thunderbolt continues to be the best way to get the highest possible speeds, Glyph’s USB-4 Atom EX40 shows that you can get very fast performance at high capacities with no compromise to consistency, all in a pretty small package.

Are There Alternatives?

The OWC Express 1M2 is a great alternative if you want to be the master of your own internal memory. We haven’t run one through our full suite of tests since the SSD unit you use will change performance, but we’ve seen excellent performance, anecdotally. With the Glyph Atom EX40, you get what you get, and that’s sealed inside the literal black box. I know there are many who would prefer to pick up an enclosure and have the ability to swap out the internals, and for those folks, the Express 1M2 will give that to you, and it can deliver similar performance.

If you’re focused on USB, the Genki Savepoint is also user-configurable and is wicked small; it just peaks at around 1,000 MB/s transfer speeds since it’s not using USB-4. Otherwise, the aforementioned ProGrade PG10 is also a solid SSD, although we have noticed that its consistency isn’t quite as good with the 16TB capacity version. You will pay a premium if you go with Glyph over ProGrade, though: the 2TB ProGrade is currently available for $360 while that same capacity in the Atom EX40 costs $499.

For Thunderbolt options, the OWC Envoy Ultra is still our top pick for speed, portability, and consistency.

Should You Buy It?

Yes. While it is more expensive than other USB-4 SSDs in its class, it is remarkably fast and consistent for such a small device. All of this is before mentioning Glyph’s excellent warranty.