ORICO K20 Mini Portable SSD Review: Tiny, Tough & MagSafe Ready

	ORICO K20 Mini Magnetic Portable SSD: $209 (2TB) The ORICO K20 Mini is a compact, durable and highly-portable external SSD, with competitive performance and a unique trick up its sleeve.
	Durable Enclosure Good Performance Highly Portable Attaches To Magsafe Devices Activity Indicator	Best Performance Requires USB 3.2 Gen 2×2 Not Quite As Fast As Some Competitiors Basic Feature Set

Fast, reliable external storage is somewhat of a necessity for many users. Whether you’re an avid creator that prefers to shoot video in RAW formats or simply want a convenient way to back up some personal files, there are an array of external storage options that fit the bill. The Orico K20 Mini we’ll be showing you here today, for example, is an ideal solution for many types of users. This tiny, portable SSD ticks a lot of boxes—it’s compact, fast, and durable, and has a unique trick up its sleeve that makes it ideal for creators that often rely on their smartphone, to actually record footage or review images and video captured on a professional camera setup. You’ll understand why the K20 Mini is a good fit for a variety of use cases as soon as you see what it can do, so let’s get right to it…

ORICO K20 Mini Magnetic Portable SSD Specs & Features

ORICO offers the K20 Mini in multiple capacities, ranging from 500GB on up to 2TB – we’ve got the highest-capacity 2TB model on hand here. The drives feature a USB 3.2 Gen2 2×2 20Gbps interface (USB Type-C connector) and is compatible with a wide range operating systems and devices.

ORICO rates the drives for transfer speeds up to 2,050MB/s reads and writes, which puts performance well ahead of any SATA-based external hard drives (or SSDs), but not on the level of some faster USB 4 or Thunderbolt-based external storage solutions. Still, roughly 2GB/s transfers are probable good enough for most users, especially if they’re moving big files around — 2GB/s mean moving 100GB of data in under a minute.

Inspecting The ORICO K20 Mini Magnetic Portable SSD

The ORICO K20 Mini’s enclosure measures a little less than 68 x 60 x 7mm, with rounded edges all around, and consists of a mix of metal allow and plastic composite material. That’s much smaller than popular drives like Samsung’s T5 or T7, and thinner and less wide than something like the ADATA SE880. It’s slightly larger than the Crucial X10 we looked at a few weeks ago, but the K20 feels more premium than the all-plastic X10, thanks to its alloy cover.

At one end of the drive, there is a single USB Type-C connection with a tiny, blue indicator LED to its side. The top of the drive carries the ORICO K20 Mini branding, while the bottom shows the capacity, serial number information, and various certification badges.

The ORICO K20 Mini is clean, simple and minimalist, and feels sturdy and durable in the hand, though it is very lightweight. What makes the enclosure somewhat unique is the incorporation of some N52 magnets, which makes it compatible with any MagSafe device, whether it be an iPhone or any of the myriad of cases or mounts out there. The K20 Mini simply snaps in place, and can be used on a phone without worrying about falls or the thing flopping around.

Included with the ORICO K20 Mini is some basic documentation and a short, flat USB Type-C to Type-C cable. It would be nice to have a USB-A to USB-C cable or adapter included as well, but a USB 3.2 Gen2 2×2 port – which is required for maximum performance – will likely have a Type-C connector anyway, not to mention all of today’s smartphones.

ORICO K20 Mini Magnetic Portable SSD Performance

In order to test the performance of the ORICO K20 Mini, we enlisted the help of some straightforward benchmarks. First up is ATTO, a disk benchmark that measures sequential transfer speeds across a specific volume length with various block sizes. It measures transfer rates for both reads and writes and graphs them out in an easily interpreted chart. ATTO’s workloads are sequential in nature and measure bandwidth, rather than I/O response time, access latency, etc.

The Crucial X10 led the pack in both the read and write tests versus a group of other popular USB external SSDs, but the ORICO K20 Mini wasn’t too far behind. The ORICO and ADATA SE880 finish right on top of each other here.

Next up are some numbers with SiSoft SANDRA, the the System ANalyzer, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant. Here, we used the Physical Disk test suite and provide the results from our comparison SSDs…

The Crucial X10 also took the pole position on this SANDRA benchmark with the ORICO K20 Mini just behind it. The drive offered excellent reads and writes, which outpaced the SE880 and Samsung T7 and T5.

CrystalDiskMark is a synthetic benchmark that tests both sequential and random small and mid-sized file transfers using incompressible data. It provides a quick look at best and worst case scenarios with regard to SSD performance, best case being larger sequential transfers and worse case being small, random transfers.

The 4K transfer tests favored the ADATA SE880 overall, but the ORICO K20 Mini and Crucial X10 trades blows here — the X10 offered faster writes, but the ORICO K20 Mini put up a better reads.

ORICO K20 Mini Magnetic Portable SSD: Our Conclusion

It’s a simplistic, relatively basic external SSD, but we really like the ORICO K20 Mini. The drive hits a lot of high notes — it’s compact, feels good in the hand, compatible with virtually any modern device with a USB-C port, available in a variety of capacities, and performance is competitive. Like other drives in its class, you’ll need a system with a USB 3.2 2×2 or USB 4 port to get the most out of the ORICO K20 Mini, but using the right interface is a requirement for top performance of any external SSD. It’s compatible with slower USB ports, but won’t perform at its optimal level.

We tested the ORICO K20 Mini on an array of devices and it always “just worked”. We mention this, because that is not always the case when building your own external storage with USB enclosures and M.2 SSDs. We tried the ORICO K20 Mini on a Samsung Galaxy S25 Android phone, a myriad of desktop and laptop PCs, and a Panasonic G9 II mirrorless camera, without issue. We specifically mention the phone and camera because the ORICO K20 Mini is capable of storing ProRes RAW directly. What’s great about such a compact drive that offers this level of performance (~2GB/s), is that it fits just about anywhere. As we mentioned in our Crucial X10 review, one of the handier use cases we found was recording directly from the camera to the ORICO K20 Mini, then plugging it into our smartphone to inspect images and video footage on its much bigger screen (and better speakers). If you’ve ever tried to watch and listen to video clips on a camera’s small rear screen and crappy internal speaker, you’ll understand how handy that is. The ORICO K20 Mini’s phone-friendly magnetic enclosure also makes it great for simply backing up a device.

While there are faster USB 4 and Thunderbolt drives on the market, they’re also more expensive, and Thunderbolt drives won’t be as broadly compatible. At about $209 – $219 for at 2TB version currently, the ORICO K20 Mini is competitively price, it offers good performance, and its unique, slim magnetic enclosure and flat cable make it a great fit for a wide variety of use cases.