A tiny yet highly capable external SSD, the Crucial X9 Pro scored well in our benchmarks and comes in capacities up to 4TB. Its interface supports the USB 3.2 Gen 2 standard, which affords near-universal compatibility if your computer has a USB port (although you’ll need an adapter to connect to a USB-A port). The X9 Pro’s basic ruggedization features and 256-bit AES encryption protect it from tumbles as well as both meteorological and human threats while you’re traveling. Who It’s For External bus-powered storage devices capable of 1GBps+ performance have become entry-level offerings in the market today, with 2GBps+ starting to become mainstream. Rapid advancements in flash technology (including the advent of 3D NAND and NVMe) as well as faster host interfaces (such as Thunderbolt 3 and USB 3.2 Gen 2+) have been key enablers. Broadly speaking, there are five distinct performance levels in this market: RUGGEDIZATION. The degree of ruggedness does vary from drive to drive, with drives like the ADATA SE800 leading the field at the moment among mainstream-price external SSDs. IP68 certification is a good spec to look for if you're serious about waterproof and dustproof drives. (Credit: Zlata Ivleva) Alas, there are enough different flavors of USB to make your head spin—made worse by the confusing nomenclature surrounding USB these days. For example, today's USB 3.2 standard is for all intents and purposes identical to USB 3.1, simply renamed. (It gets even more confusing with the latest kind of USB: The forthcoming USB4 will absorb Thunderbolt.) That said, you'll still see older USB terminology on your PC or Mac and on many SSDs, so you need to know what term correlates to what.

Few current laptops have native support for USB 3.2 Gen 2x2, but some (usually higher-end) desktop motherboards do, and desktop PCI Express expansion cards are available. Although Gen 2x2 drives are capable of blazing speeds, you may have to roll up your sleeves to craft a properly optimized system.

Lexar SL660 Blaze Game Portable SSD

External USB drive tests currently utilize Windows 11 64-bit running on an MSI MEG X570/AMD Ryzen 3700X combo with four 16GB Kingston 2666MHz DDR4 modules, a Zotac (Nvidia) GT 710 1GB x2 PCIe graphics card, and an Asmedia ASM3242 USB 3.2×2 card. Copy tests utilize an ImDisk RAM disk using 58GB of the 64GB total memory. The answer is - unsurprisingly - yes. See an internal SSD is just a bunch of components inside a casing (either plastic or metal), an enclosure that actually protects the electronics inside. Protecting it with an outer case is therefore superfluous unless you want to physically hide the drive for whatever reason or want to make it look more aesthetic. Performance, then, is hamstrung in part by Kingston’s baffling decision to release it right before the launch of the speedier USB 4.0. During our review, we noted “it really, really needs a compatible system to hit its headline speed of 2GBps, allowing it to rival Thunderbolt 3.” A misstep for an otherwise excellent portable SSD with 500GB, 1TB, 2TB, and 4TB models available. On paper, the Kingston XS2000 is very competitive with SanDisk's Extreme Pro v2. It not only outperformed the SanDisk and most 20Gbps competitors in read workloads and managing small datasets, but it also hung fairly tight alongside the Samsung X5. Its material mix makes for a solid and light SSD design that is water and dust-resistant, too. However, it's not quite as rugged as the SanDisk or Samsung drives, and if you don't use the rubber sleeve, the IP55 dust- and water-resistant rating isn't guaranteed. Storage capacity is a key area when comparing the best portable SSD. Ideally, we want to see a broad range for a broad user-base. Several models are now capable of storing up to 2TB of data, but not everyone requires this much space, and opting for a model with less capacity may be one way to save some money.

Kingston Technology Europe Co LLP and Kingston Technology Company, Inc., are part of the same corporate group (“Kingston”). Kingston is the world’s largest independent manufacturer of memory products. From big data, to laptops and PCs, to IoT-based devices like smart and wearable technology, to design-in and contract manufacturing, Kingston helps deliver the solutions used to live, work and play. The world’s largest PC makers and cloud-hosting companies depend on Kingston for their manufacturing needs, and our passion fuels the technology the world uses every day. We strive beyond our products to see the bigger picture, to meet the needs of our customers and offer solutions that make a difference. To learn more about how Kingston Is With You, visit Kingston.com. In addition to 640MBps, you'll also see USB 3.0's theoretical data rate described as 5Gbps. (That's gigabits, not gigabytes, per second.) You also may see this interface dubbed "USB 3.1 Gen 1" or "SuperSpeed USB 5Gbps" (in practice, all three are the same thing), to differentiate it from "USB 3.1 Gen 2" or "SuperSpeed USB 10Gbps," which raises the ceiling to (you guessed it!) 10Gbps. USB 3.1 Gen 2 is the latest version widely available in consumer external SSDs at this writing. PCIe external SSDs can take advantage of the extra 5Gbps of bandwidth, but you need to have a USB port that supports the spec to see the extra speed benefit. (And yes, we are talking about "USB 3.1" as opposed to "USB 3.2." Bear with us.) The Kingston XS2000 series is the first portable SSD family to use Silicon Motion's SM2320 platform. Available in three capacities - 500GB, 1TB, and 2TB, the drives promise speeds of up to 2000 MBps. The company sent across samples of all three capacity points in the lineup to put through our rigorous direct-attached storage evaluation process. The review below presents the detailed evaluation report of drives, with emphasis on the aspects that were not covered in the UFD controller preview. Introduction and Product Impressions External SSDs are now readily available and cheaper than they were a few years ago, but it will probably be a while before they are a complete replacement for hard drives. Physically larger external drives designed to stay on your desk or in a server closet still mostly use 3.5-inch platter drives inside, taking advantage of their vast capacities and much lower prices per gigabyte compared with SSDs. Thunderbolt and USB 3.2 Gen 2×2 are different technologies with different specs that use the same connector (Type-C). Basically, the XS2000 SSD needs to be connected to a USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 USB (Type-C) port and use the appropriate cable to reach the advertised speed. Even though Thunderbolt 3 & 4 use a Type-C connector and advertise up to 40Gbps of transfer speed, the pins layout (aka lanes) are different from the one of USB 3.2 Gen 2x2. The pins of the Type-C connector need to be allocated for data transfer to reach the 20GBps of USB 3.2 Gen 2x2. For the Thunderbolt Type-C connector, some of the pins (2 lanes) are used for video signals (or else) and not specifically dedicated to data transfer, that is why the data transfer speed is lower with Thunderbolt.”XS2000 delivers lightning-fast transfer speeds up to 2,000MB/s 1 giving users enhanced productivity with little interruption. XS2000 offers remarkable performance and capacities up to 2TB 2 to offload and edit high-res images, 8K videos and large documents in a flash. The drive connects with USB Type-C® 3 allowing content creators to easily store and access their files anywhere on a PC or mobile device. At nearly half the size of a typical portable SSD, XS2000 includes a removable ruggedized sleeve and IP55-rating 4 to withstand water and dust, making it the perfect companion for on-location adventures whether you go from work to play to passion projects. The Seagate OneTouch is a flawless portable SSD, offering exactly what you’d expect - and then a bit more. Inside, you’ll find a SN550E, a PCIe Gen3 x4 NVMe drive that pairs an ASMedia ASM2362 bridge with a SanDisk 20-82-10023 controller and SanDisk BiCS 4 96L 3D TLC flash memory. During our benchmarking with CrystalDiskMark, the drive reached 1046MBps (read) and 1013MBps (write). Other benchmarks delivered the same range of results but transferring a single 10GB file proved to be slower than expected. The XS2000 is a great choice as a general-purpose ultraportable drive, as long as you don't need frills like hardware-based data encryption. Our only caveat? Take what we always say about how easy it is to accidentally lose a portable SSD, and double it.