The heat dissipated by the NVMe controller and the NAND chips inside is rapidly evacuated by the metal casing. The WD My Passport external SSD runs hot, far hotter than we were expecting. It can also go all the way to 2.4GBps which would make it a candidate for a theoretical USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 version of the drive that would adopt a 20Gbps interface (and potentially USB4/Thunderbolt 3). It is worth noting the SN550 tops at 1TB whereas the My Passport SSD goes to 2TB. Internally, this is the SN550E, a PCIe Gen3 x4 NVMe drive that pairs an ASMedia ASM2362 bridge with a SanDisk 20-82-10023 controller and SanDisk BiCS 4 96L 3D TLC flash memory.
No status light to indicate if the device is operating, which is an odd omission. It has a Type-C connector with a short Type-C to Type-C cable (plus a Type-A to type-C converter) thrown in the box.
