But if you need cavernous amounts of external storage, a hard drive is a better option for most, as multi-terabyte external SSDs sell for several hundred dollars, but 4TB portable hard drives can sell for under $100 (£90). A portable SSD will also be much faster at reading and writing lots of data. If you don’t need terabytes of storage and you often travel with your drive, a portable SSD is worth paying extra for. But they’re also much slower and more fragile than solid-state drives. Portable Hard Drive or SSD? Drives that have spinning storage platters inside are very affordable, with 1TB models often selling for under $50 (£40).When shopping for an external drive or SSD, consider the following:

Picking the Best External Drive or SSD for You If you're curious about the kinds of speed and features that will be available with cutting-edge and future external drives, check out Everything We Know About USB 4.0, as well as the emerging (and confusing) USB 4 2.0 (80 Gbps) standard. And you may not want to pay for extra speed if the ports where you use the drive most are old and slow. Consider how rugged your drive needs to be, how much capacity you need, and what connections will be available in places where you'll want to plug in your drive. An extremely fast drive at home won't be useful if you can't plug it in at work or school. To help you pick the best portable external drive for your needs, we test and review dozens of drives as they become available and publish our list of specific recommendations for the best portable SSDs and hard drives on this page.īefore we get to the picks, there are a few important things to think about, whether you need a drive for work, school or home use. But with dozens of portable storage options available, how do you know which is the right external drive to buy? Should you opt for a speedier, more rugged (and more expensive) external SSD instead of a portable hard drive made up of comparatively fragile spinning platters and an actuator arm? Or could a slower, roomier and much cheaper portable hard drive OK for your storage needs?

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