ASUS ROG Strix Arion S500 Review – Stylin’ and system-profilin’

Portable storage devices are a dime a dozen these days, but if you’re looking for a unit that combines rugged style with some impressive power, then the ASUS ROG Strix Arion S500 is bound to turn a few heads.

Let’s address the carbon-fiber elephant in the room: This portable drive looks like it would fit perfectly into the world of Blade Runner or Aliens, thanks to its solid aluminum chassis, signature Republic of Gamers flair, and a touch of RGB via ASUS Aura Sync. Overkill, but the type that’s designed to be a rubber-neckin’ accessory. Annoyingly, you’ll need to use your own type-C to type-A cable, as out of the box the drive only comes with a cable that doubles up on the A-type USB configurations.

Internally is where the drive really comes into its own though, as the case protects a 500GB PCIe NVMe SSD with DRAM and SLC Cache. In normal speak, that means that this drive is a fast little devil, with ASUS boasting that it’s capable of reaching read and write speeds of 1,050 mb/s. In actual testing? It’s close! Using CrystalDiskMark–and doing some testing of my own by copying over anime series that were legitimately acquired I swear–the Arion S500 was regularly breaking past the file transfer speed of 900 mb/s. At one point it managed to reach an impressive 982.79 mb/s on my PC.

That’s fast, and even though the drive is only 500 GB–465 GB after digital real estate tax–it makes for a sturdy and reliable piece of technology. On top of that is some forward-thinking in the cooling department, as the 1.5mm thermal pad on the enclosure works in tandem with the aluminum casing to keep it a cozy temperature. Perfect for all-day work when it’s tethered to a PC.

In a more practical test, I wanted to see how the Arion S500 would function as a spare SSD for the Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5. Both consoles boast lightning-fast transfer speeds and incredibly quick performance within their respective games, so would this portable drive be able to match them and provide a handy alternative when space runs out? The short answer is…no.

Try as I might, I just couldn’t get games to run off the drive at all. I don’t know if that’s the fault of the consoles or my own stupidity, but considering that each machine had a less-fancy Western-Digital drive attached to them as back-ups that functioned just fine with last-gen titles, I couldn’t understand why the Arion S500 was giving me trouble.

Bafflingly, the drive could be used to store games once it had been properly formatted. On the plus side, this made the Arion S500 superb for quickly backing up games so that I had space to install some review titles on each console, with one prime example being the PS5 when I moved Final Fantasy VII Remake and some indie titles over to it. That transfer was in excess of over 100 GB, and the console was able to migrate the content within 14 minutes. Not too shabby!