It doesn't, but in my informal tests (I haven't had time to set up a thorough benchmark) real-world usage of an external USB 3.0 SSD (testing with a cheap Kingston SSD, though, and a cheap USB SATA interface) is only marginally faster than a Samsung Evo+ microSD card.
I wonder if this is also due to the fact that many desktop SSDs do not focus on 4k read/write performance. This is one big area where nvme SSDs seem to have an advantage, their 4k read/write is usually significantly higher than that of other SSDs (at least from benchmarks I've seen).
Maybe even a lower end nvme ssd + usb enclosure would be the way to go to get the best performance.
Unless there's something about the USB interface itself that kills random 4k r/w performance?
True; some of the cheapest SSDs I've tested seem to just be the same package that would be inside a USB flash drive or SD card, hardwired to an SATA plug in a giant 2.5" enclosure!
