We'll finish this guide with a spec breakout of all of our top picks. Then read on for a detailed guide to how to shop for the portable SSD that best meets your needs. And a lack of moving parts makes mobile SSDs smaller, slimmer, and better suited to frequent travel and accidental drops than even ruggedized hard drives.īelow, check out our favorite models we've tested from all our recent SSD reviews. They have no metal platters to spin up, nor any read/write heads that need to travel to a specific point on a platter to find the file you need. Nowadays, pocket-size, USB-powered external SSDs deliver as much as 10 times the speed of portable hard drives, and much greater durability. Once prohibitively expensive, SSDs of all stripes, internal and external, have plunged in price over the past few years.

The newer, better one is a portable solid-state drive (SSD). Need to expand the local storage on your PC or Mac for music and movies, or all the pics and videos you collect from your phone? The traditional answer has been an external hard drive. Since 1982, PCMag has tested and rated thousands of products to help you make better buying decisions. How to Set Up Two-Factor Authentication.How to Record the Screen on Your Windows PC or Mac.How to Convert YouTube Videos to MP3 Files.How to Save Money on Your Cell Phone Bill.How to Free Up Space on Your iPhone or iPad.How to Block Robotexts and Spam Messages.

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