When considering whether to buy an external SSD, make sure you know what you're paying a premium for.Įxternal SSDs are now readily available and cheaper than they were a few years ago, but they'll probably never be a complete replacement for hard drives. If speed, resilience, and portability are critical to you, all that extra money is probably worth it.

That's not a typo-you'll pay four or five times as much for the same amount of storage. A 2TB external SSD, on the other hand, will run you about $250 to $300. Want a 2TB portable hard drive? You can find one from major brands such as Seagate and Western Digital for as little as $60. Still, you do pay for that speed and durability.

Practically speaking, this means you can move gigabytes of data (say, a 4GB feature film, or a year's worth of family photos) to your external SSD in seconds rather than the minutes it would take with an external hard drive. Our typical benchmark-test results for even run-of-the-mill external SSDs show speeds in excess of 400MBps. (One factor is spin rate-among external drives, 5,400rpm units are more common and more affordable than 7,200rpm.) Just how much faster is it to read data from flash cells than from particular points on spinning platters? Typical throughput for consumer hard drives is in the range of 100MBps to 200MBps. By contrast, if you jolt an SSD while you're reading or writing data, there is no risk that your files will become corrupted and unreadable.Īnd, again, hard drives are slower because they have to physically access your data.

If you drop the drive, you could damage the interior mechanism and make your data inaccessible. But the same tech that makes hard drives a tantalizing value becomes their biggest liability when used on the go. Since hard drives are mechanical devices that use mature technology, you can get relatively huge amounts of storage capacity for the money. These are similar to the silicon that makes up a computer's RAM, but they retain your data when electrical power is cut off. Unlike a hard drive, which stores data on spinning platters accessed by a moving magnetic head, a solid-state drive uses a collection of 'persistent' flash memory cells to save data.

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