TeamGroup’s new portable SSD features a physical kill-switch for spies and definitely not for people who can’t stop fiddling with buttons
I’ve had to contend with far fewer dicey data management situations than all that spy-fi I watched at an impressionable age led me to believe—just like quicksand, it’s just not a day-to-day thing I need to worry about. Well, TeamGroup has unveiled a portable SSD that’ll allow me to live out my youthful Mission: Impossible fantasy with less of a bang and presumably at great expense.
The Expert P35S is a 2TB portable SSD that you can wipe at the click of a button—okay, it’s more like a click and a slide. Billed as the ‘anti-mistouch two-step trigger,’ once activated, all data on the device is electrically destroyed and rendered unrecoverable thanks to a patented ‘physical chip destruction circuit.’
The device weighs only 42 g. 90 mm in length, 40 mm in width, and 18 mm in height, the SSD can easily fit in one hand. I can just picture it now: a latex-clad spy finds themselves staring down a ne’er-do-well in some remote urbex spot. Upon being asked if they have the dossier, they whip out the SSD from some improbable pocket and say, “Yeah, I have it—but you never will.” *CLICK* (*SLIDE*)
Data management fanfiction aside, the Expert P35S offers one USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-C port alongside performance that promises to shift data up to 1,000 MB/s. Though we’ve not had a chance to test it out ourselves, TeamGroup suggests that its portable SSD will be able to sustain this rate as the much quippier phrase, “transfer 10 GB in just 10 seconds, ready for anything,” is placed prominently on its Computex 2025 display. That probably won’t make it one of the best external SSDs for gaming, but it’s decently speedy nonetheless.
That said, the TeamGroup PD20 is still our top pick for the best portable SSD, so perhaps data management with an air of danger will unseat one of our favourites.
The TeamGroup Expert P35S is pitched at journalists, agents, and anyone else who may need NDA-violating files on the go. TeamGroup’s display also suggests ‘defense use.’ Given the doozy of a security blunder by US government officials in very recent memory, I’m not sure how to feel about that particular application. While those Signal screenshots are forever, I’m going to do my best to set aside that challenging geo-political situation just for the moment.
I keep coming back to what is essentially the self-destruct mechanism. Now, I tend to trust physical media more than I trust cloud-based storage solutions, but I absolutely do not trust myself with this sort of data kill switch.
You see, in video call meetings, my colleagues are haunted by an ever-present click-click-click—and it’s me with my fidget cube. Rather than the hyper-competent spy of my Mission: Impossible fanfic, I can only see myself looking down at the Expert P35S I’ve been absently pawing at like a fidget toy and saying, “Oh, arse—I’ve only gone and done it again.”
