SSD is the first choice for reliable, fast external storage, and it’s just such a useful tool to boost your productivity, gaming, and other stuff significantly. Today, we will be sharing features, how well they can perform, and which are worth considering. This article gives you a good idea about choosing between an external SSD and an external mechanical hard drive. Straightforward SSDs have a couple of advantages, including being lighter and smaller, making them more portable, less noisy, faster, and more resistant to drops and bumps.
Since it was less likely to get a break, you would likely lose your data. Combining all these advantages, SSDs are more expensive than mechanical hard drives. Until you don’t require a massive amount of storage, don’t consider buying SSDs.
Pricing and warranty
Best External SSD for encryption:Â Samsung T7 Touch
Pricing for these SSDs varies from time to time, so before making a purchase decision, consider checking prices. Check the company’s warranty.
USB Drives & SSDs: External Storage
So if you were looking for SSDs for playing games on PCs or consoles, it fits you perfectly. There are several types of SSD available. The cheapest SSDs come with USB drives that connect using SATA internally and allow you to connect with a PC using a USB port. These drivers usually come with a speed of ~550MB/s to ~600MB/s, 5x faster than mechanical USB.
The Best Affordable USB (SATA) SSD
- Sandisk Extreme Portable SSD
- Samsung T5 portable SSD
- Seagate Barracuda Fast SSD
- Samsung
- SanDisk
- LaCie
- Western Digital
- HyperX
- Seagate
- MINIX
- Transcend
Seagate SSDs perform great but cost more and are heavier than others. Samsung’s SSD is priced competitively and worth considering, especially if you want to work directly from your drive. Sandisk is quite portable, lightweight, and IP55 water and dust-resistant. Among other SSDs, MINIX comes with an external USB port and HDMI port for Mac devices. However, it doesn’t exist among the best to consider using it as an SSD over other ones.
NVMe USB Drive
These are primarily for those users who frequently copy a heavy amount of data or use work directly from their SSDs. On top of that, it is also compatible with USB Type-C and Type-A cables. Another USB driver is NVME Drives internally. These are a bit more expensive, but the speed is capped due to USB ports up to ~1000 MB/s. For this, you are at least required to have a USB 3.0 or Gen USB port; if you don’t have it, it is still going to work, but the speed will be restricted.
NvME SSDs: Fastest External SSDs (USB)
- Crucial X8 Portable SSD
- Sandisk Extreme PRO Portable SSD
- Transcend ESD350C
- Crucial
- Sandisk
- Samsung T7 Touch
- Transcend ESD
Compared to SATA-based USB drives, people looking for the fastest speed want to juice up the performance. These are way faster drives; among these, the Samsung T7 isn’t the best choice when considering NVMe SSDs, but the built-in fingerprint reader allows you to have encryption to make your workspace safe.
Others do offer encryption features, but for those, you have to use software. Crucial and Sandisk perform better than Samsung and Transcend in every benchmark. Crucial does feel premium if you compare it to the Sandisk build.
Thunderbolt 3 Drive
These are the most expensive drives to consider, and they allow a transfer rate of 4 GB/s. This means it performs similarly to your PC’s internal storage. Before buying this, check if your system supports Thunderbolt.
Thunderbolt
- Sabrent Rocket XTRM
- Samsung X5
- Samsung X5
- Sabrent Rocket XTRM
It can easily handle 4K video editing directly from the SSD and the extra performance. Sabrent was slightly ahead of Samsung, but both offer solid tip-to-tip performance. One negative effect of using a Thunderbolt 3 drive while transferring a chunk of files at a time is that it gets heated. Both handle thermal throttling differently; Samsung manages heat better than Sabrent.
Bonus recommendations
- Lacie Portable SSD
- HyperX Savage Exo
- WD My Passport SSD
- Minix Neo Storage