A Reddit user shared the 16TB SSD they bought on eBay for less than $30 (EUR 25), which only contained a board and a microSD card hot-glued with some weights to make it feel like a legitimate drive. u/Hartkralle shared their find, saying that they buy from these suspicious listings when they come across them. Since eBay has a robust consumer protection policy, they get their money back while the seller loses their account.

16 TB SSD for only 25€? What could go wrong? from r/pcmasterrace

"I buy one, check if it's legit or not, and if not, [I] report the seller to eBay. I get my money back, and they (the seller) lose [their] account,” u/HarkKralle said in a comment. “If I couldn't ensure that the money would flow back, I wouldn't do it.”

Another Redditor said that they appreciate what the OP was doing, but they were “99.99% positive” that the scammer would have another account in an hour. The OP replied, saying, “Possible, but even that it's an hour they cannot use to scam people and proof/information for more people that scams like this exist.”

Scams like these have been around for decades now. One commenter even added that back in the ‘90s, they used high-quality 60-minute VHS tapes for their work, but one time received cheap, low-quality tapes that could only hold five minutes of footage instead. The sample that u/Hartkralle showed is also relatively low effort. Because of the ongoing memory and chip shortage, we’ve seen exceptionally good clones of Samsung 990 Pro SSDs, one of the best SSDs you can buy today. They have become so sophisticated that the most reliable way of spotting if they’re fake is to check them on CrystalDiskInfo.

One of the downsides of these fake drives is that you won’t get the read and write speeds that you’d expect from a modern SSD. But the bigger issue here is that using them could lead to complete data loss. For example, the fake drive that u/Hartkralle bought reports a capacity of 16TB, but the microSD card inside it is only 60GB. So, if an unsuspecting user transfers more than 60GB of data, they’d end up corrupting everything stored in the drive.

A 2TB Amazon Basics Portable SSD already costs almost $360, while an 8TB SSD from reputable brands like SanDisk, Crucial, or Lexar already hit $850. So, someone who doesn’t follow developments in the tech industry and stumbles across this cheap drive might think they’re getting a steal, when, in reality, they’re the ones being stolen from. Thankfully, eBay’s consumer protection allows people who were scammed, intentionally or otherwise, to get their money back — that is, if they know they were scammed in the first place.

Normally retailing for $1,999.99, Sandisk’s spacious and lightning-fast external SSD is currently available for just $739.99, letting you save a staggering $1,260. That's a rare deal in these times of the storage shortage apocalypse. If you need to supercharge your professional workflow or simply want a high-capacity drive for all your backups, the Sandisk Desk Drive 8TB is a game-changer that's worth considering.

• Check out the Sandisk Desk Drive 8TB deal on Amazon
• Check out the Sandisk Desk Drive 8TB deal on Best Buy

Measuring just 3.91 x 3.91 x 1.58 inches and weighing a mere 0.5 pounds, the Sandisk Desk Drive 8TB is a compact external SSD. Don't let the small footprint fool you, though. The external SSD packs 8TB of storage. That's more than enough for millions of high-resolution photographs, over 150 hours of 4K videos, or over 50 modern AAA titles.

When it comes to performance, the Sandisk Desk Drive 8TB delivers sequential read speeds of up to 1,000 MB/s and write speeds up to 900 MB/s for fast data transfers. While it may not be the fastest external drive by today's standards, understandable, given it was released three years ago, the Sandisk Desk Drive 8TB remains a very competitive option for most users. By comparison, it is up to four times faster than your traditional desktop hard drive.

The Sandisk Desk Drive 8TB features an impressive sustained write speed of 1,000 MB/s, so it's a good addition to any creative professional's arsenal. Demanding projects involving high-resolution video or massive photo libraries will not faze the external SSD. For instance, you can transfer 100GB of data to the Sandisk Desk Drive 8TB in just over a minute and a half, thanks to its fast USB Type-C interface.

The ongoing memory and storage shortage has caused external SSD prices to soar through the roof. For $739.99, the Sandisk Desk Drive 8TB is a great pickup and a rare opportunity to upgrade your setup with a premium device at a fraction of the cost. When you consider it, the external SSD is only 6% above the original MSRP of $699.99, a price point that has long disappeared.

In today’s inflated storage market, where external SSD pricing has doubled since the shortage, even the manufacturer, Sandisk, is currently selling the same drive for $1,599.99. Opportunities to purchase a drive, such as the Sandisk Desk Drive 8TB at a reasonable price, are exceedingly rare.

If you're looking for more savings, check out our Best PC Hardware deals for a range of products, or dive deeper into our specialized SSD and Storage Deals, Hard Drive Deals, Gaming Monitor Deals, Graphics Card Deals, Gaming Chair, Best Wi-Fi Routers, Best Motherboard, or CPU Deals pages.

Adding more storage to your PC can prove to be a difficult task if your GPU is covering the M.2 slots. And if they're already filled, adding an expansion card to an empty PCIe slot can be a bit tricky because your GPU could block that, too. JEYI, a popular accessories manufacturer from China, has a solution to this problem: a flat PCIe-to-M.2 adapter that sits completely flush with the motherboard.

Most AIC (add-in cards) take up perpendicular space inside the chassis because they stick out vertically from the motherboard. Modern graphics cards are often so large that they block even neighboring PCIe slots, making it impossible to add the adapter even if there's space otherwise. JEYI's flat adapter solves this by putting the M.2 slot parallel to the board, similar to an actual, native M.2 slot, so it doesn't protrude at all.

The adapter is called "ArcherX" and comes in two flavors: PCIe 4.0 x1 and PCIe 4.0 x4. Both are also backward compatible with PCIe 3.0, and the vendor teased a PCIe 5.0 adapter in the works as well. The card is made by soldering two PCBs together — on one side, you have the PCIe connector itself and, on the other, you have the M.2 slot. It has a long, thin bar sticking out with a screw mount at the end for full-size (2280) SSDs. Contrary to how it may look, the company says it's very rigid.

JEYI chose to keep the adapter as small as possible to ensure no surrounding componentry comes in the way. There's no price or availability yet, but considering PCIe to M.2 adapters are cheap, and JEYI produces budget-oriented accessories, we should see this drop around the $20-30 mark. If you want to see another useful PCIe adapter like this one, check out this platypus adapter that adds two M.2 slots.

It turns out that you can use a PCIe to CFexpress adapter that plugs into a PCIe slot on your motherboard to use Xbox Series X|S Storage Expansion Cards as local storage in your PC.

Despite largely identical specs under the hood, Microsoft and Sony took different approaches to external storage for their current-gen consoles. While the PS5 has a dedicated M.2 slot, the Xbox Series X|S is stuck with proprietary Storage Expansion Cards made by Seagate and Western Digital. Turns out, they're actually not completely inflexible after all, as u/Dramatic-Shape5574 on Reddit showed you can use cheap CFexpress adapters to make these cards work on a PC.

Using Xbox Series X/S expansion cards as PC Storage from r/xbox

This is not exactly groundbreaking news; it's been known for a while that these expansion cards use the CFexpress Type-B connector. The standard itself uses the NVMe protocol, but it's limited to a PCIe 3.0 x2 connection. Microsoft's custom version of it, however, supports PCIe 4.0 x2. Previously, someone even made an M.2 to CFexpress adapter that took a rare PCIe 4.0 x2 M.2 SSD and converted it into an expansion card for Xbox.

We're looking at the opposite situation here, turning an Xbox Expansion Card into regular storage for a PC. The OP used a PCIe to CFexpress adapter that plugs into a PCIe slot on your motherboard, giving you a female CFexpress slot in return. There are also M.2 to CFexpress adapters that connect to the M.2 slot instead of a PCIe slot, if that's more convenient for you. Just make sure to choose one that says "Type-B."

500 GB Xbox Expansion Card for $99 (Western Digital only)

1 TB Xbox Expansion Card for $189.99 (Seagate)

1 TB Xbox Expansion Card for $149.99 (Western Digital)

2 TB Xbox Expansion Card for $275.88 (Seagate)

2 TB Xbox Expansion Card for $249.99 (Western Digital)

4 TB Xbox Expansion Card for $549.99 (Seagate only)

There's only one caveat — you need to format the Expansion Card before it can be used inside Windows. It'll still be recognized, but the Xbox-specific file system won't work with any OS directly. After formatting, it's picked up as a normal SSD with read and write speeds of up to 1,117 MB/s and 1,570 MB/s, respectively. That's much slower than even entry-level PCIe 3.0 drives, but fast enough for general usage, nonetheless.

The ongoing component crisis caused by the AI boom has skyrocketed the prices of memory and storage, so if you happen to have an Xbox Expansion Card lying around, these CFexpress adapters can be the perfect stopgap. And if you want to get your hands on a new Expansion Card, you're in luck because a lot of the models are on sale. We've listed multiple options above for each storage capacity in case any deal runs out.

There's no difference between the Seagate and Western Digital models, but we noticed the WD SKUs were consistently cheaper than the Seagate ones. Both are certified by Xbox, so they have identical specs and performance. That means there shouldn't be a difference in their adapted performance on PC either. If any of the Amazon links above expire, you can check out the deals on Best Buy and Newegg.

Sharge's Disk Pro portable SSD is proof that there's room for innovation, even in a product category as established as 10 Gbps (USB 3.2 Gen 2) external SSDs. With its built-in USB / HDMI hub, as well as a fan for extra cooling, plus the company's signature eye-catching translucent shell, it's far more interesting (and more genuinely useful for those on the go) than most ho-hum drives in this well-established speed class.

Plus, as we'll see in testing, while it's not the speediest of 10 Gbps drives in all tests, it excels where it counts, for the professional users who may be drawn in by the "Pro" in the drive's name. It's one of the best-performing drives in its class when it comes to sustained writes. And with so many laptops, phones, and tablets making do with just USB-C, it's a great drive to keep in your travel bag.

Its primary downside is price, with the 2TB model selling for around $365 when I tested it, and since climbing to around $385. That's a lot to ask for a drive of this capacity and class, but in case you haven't noticed, the cost of storage these days is following RAM into the stratosphere, thanks to demand from AI hyperscalers.

Specs

Design and accessories

The Sharge Disk Pro comes with a simple carrying sleeve and a couple of sticky-backed magnetic rings you can stick onto a gaming console or laptop lid so you can conveniently connect and carry the drive – but the primary accessories are baked in.

The cable is attached and clips into the USB-C port of the hub when not in use, covering the HDMI 2.1, USB 3.0, and USB 2.0 ports. The cable is short, at a little over three inches, and it's permanently attached, so it could certainly fail over time. But I didn't have much of an issue with the length during my testing.

The side of the drive has a button to force the built-in fan on, for what the company calls Turbo Mode, designed to keep the drive at 50 degrees C for the heaviest of workloads. But the fan turns on by itself regardless when needed, and is rated to adjust between 7,000 and 10,000 RPM.

I tested the drive in automatic mode, because it runs close to the top end of its interface bottleneck by default. And I probably wouldn't use the turbo mode unless I was doing something like filling the entire drive. Although the fan doesn't have a particularly annoying pitch, it's a roughly 40 mm, high-RPM fan, so it's definitely noticeable when it's on.

There's also a switch next to the fan button, which Sharge says is for data production and drive preservation. But it's also useful not to have to power up the drive when you just want to use the baked-in hub.

As you can see in the photos, the front is also transparent, with the controller and other components visible.

And the back is metal, with a built-in magnet for snapping onto a modern smartphone – or you could stick one of the two included metal rings to a gaming handheld or a laptop lid and use the device that way. Just be careful where you put the ring, because the cable is, again, quite short.

It's also worth pointing out that despite having four extra ports and a fan, the Disk Pro is still impressively small, at 90 x 61 x 11 mm. Its size, combined with the transparent top, reminded me so much of an old-school cassette that I had to dig one out for comparison.

The only thing I really don't like about the Disk Pro's design is that, because the USB connector docks in the hub's USB-C port when not in use, that port is surrounded by plastic, so many USB-C cables won't fit. Specifically, the first three fast USB4 and 20 Gbps USB cables I dug up didn't fit, before I found one with a port end that was thin enough to plug into the hub.

So I'd recommend finding a cable that fits and keeping it with the drive if you're often using the hub along with the internal SSD. And you'll probably want to find a compatible cable, because the USB-C port in the Disk Pro supports up to 100W input and 85W output, so you can keep your laptop, phone, or handheld charged while you use the drive and the hub.

The SSD itself, which Sharge says uses WD's BiCS6 NAND, ships empty, and there is no mention of software that I could find on the product page. So whatever software you want to use with the drive, you'll have to find it for yourself.

Comparison products

Outside of a few drive enclosures with built-in USB hubs, the Disc Pro doesn't have a lot in the way of direct competition if you are looking for a portable SSD with a handful of handy ports. However, if you're happy to carry around a separate hub and drive, there are lots of similarly speedy portable SSD options.

Most of the external SSD competition has also risen in price pretty drastically in the last several months. Crucial's X9 Pro (which we tested alongside the X10 Pro in 2023) is one of the better-performing 10 Gbps drives, but the 2TB model seems to have been discontinued – the 1TB model currently sells for around $173 and the 4TB model is $318 at Amazon. Any way you slice it, the Disk Pro is pricey, at $379 for the 2TB version we tested, and a whopping $669 for the 4TB model.

The 2TB X10 Pro is just $236 and has twice the bandwidth of the Disk Pro, but you'd need to have a 20 Gbps port to take advantage of that extra speed. Most other name-brand external SSDs are priced higher than Crucial's drives these days, though. Perhaps because the brand has been killed off by parent company Micron to focus on the AI market, so it doesn't care much to capitalize on existing stock. SanDisk's 10 Gbps 2TB Extreme Portable SSD is currently $299.

Storage Testbed

In 2025, we updated our external storage testbed to an AMD Ryzen 7600X-based PC with an Asus ROG Crosshair X870E Hero motherboard, installed in Lian Li’s Lancool 217 case. This was done in part because we needed a system with native USB4 support for upcoming drives (like this one).

All the drives in the charts below have been re-tested on the new X870E system, with the exception of the final Iometer sustained sequential test. That benchmark is less about top speed and more about how long a drive can write before depleting any fast cache onboard. We also updated to CrystalDiskMark 8, rather than the older (and non-comparable) version 7 we used on the previous testbed.

Trace Testing - PCMark 10 Storage Benchmark

PCMark 10 is a trace-based benchmark that uses a wide-ranging set of real-world traces from popular applications and everyday tasks to measure the performance of storage devices.

Sharge's Disk Pro looks pretty good on this first test, landing behind the 40 Gbps Corsair drive and Crucial's 20 Gbps X10. The only 10 Gbps drive that beat the Sharge here was Orico's BookDrive, which we recently tested. Its score of 1171 put it ahead of all the other 10 Gbps drives tested here.

Transfer Rates – DiskBench

In this real-world file transfer test, the Disk Pro landed behind 10 Gbps drives like Crucial's X9 Pro and the PX10 from Silicon Power on reads, but ahead of most of the competition in its class. Its read speeds were better than the Samsung T9, although Sammy's drive was faster on writes.

Synthetic Testing CrystalDiskMark

CrystalDiskMark (CDM) is a free and easy-to-run storage benchmarking tool that SSD companies commonly use to assign product performance specifications. It gives us insight into how each device handles different file sizes. We run this test at its default settings.

Moving back to synthetic tests, the Sharge drive looked good in our sequential testing, only beaten (again) by the X9 Pro and faster 20-40 Gbps drives from Crucial and Corsair on the read side. Writes were a little slower, but still above the 1000 MB/s threshold.

In small file performance, the Disk Pro performed its worst on our charts, although its writes were still right around the middle of this test pack.

Sustained Write Performance

A drive's rated write specifications are only a piece of the performance picture. Most external SSDs (just like their internal counterparts) implement a write cache, or a fast area of flash, programmed to perform like faster SLC, that absorbs incoming data.

Sustained write speeds often suffer tremendously when the workload saturates the cache and slips into the "native" TLC or QLC flash. We use Iometer to hammer the SSD with sequential writes for 15 minutes to measure the size of the write cache and performance after the cache is saturated.

Perhaps aided by its built-in fan, which kicks on automatically when needed, the Sharge Disk Pro started off not far from the drive's max bandwidth, in the 930 MB/s range, and only dipped slightly after about 90 seconds, staying easily above 900 MB/s for the rest of our 15-minute charted results. In fact, we let the test run for a full half hour, and the drive maintained that speed throughout.

Contrast that with the Orico drive, which looked fine in a few of the other benchmarks, but did abysmally here, dropping to less than a fifth of the Disk Pro's speed after roughly two minutes. The Sharge Disk Pro earns its "Pro" badge, and then some, on this test. Among drives of its class, only the Crucial X9 Pro did better here, and not by much.

Bottom Line

On the one hand, the Sharge Disk Pro is easily the most interesting, innovative, and genuinely useful 10 Gbps drives I've tested, possibly ever. Its built-in hub makes it great for travel or on-the-go work, and its performance is close enough to the best in its class that you wouldn't notice the difference outside of benchmarks. Then there's the magnetic back, which can make use and travel with mobile devices more convenient – though I don’t think I'd personally stick a metal ring on the back of my laptop for use with this drive. Out of all the drives I've tested in the past several years, if I didn't need anything faster than 10 Gbps, this is the drive I would reach for when on the go, because my laptop doesn't have enough ports.

All that said, it's hard to ignore the drive's price. To be fair, the cost of most storage has been ramping up for months, thanks to AI-driven demand. And most recently released competing drives are at least similarly pricey. But some older drives have remained more reasonably priced – for however long stock of those drives lasts.

Crucial's X9 in particular is stiff competition at the moment. While the 2TB model seems to be out of stock, the 1TB X9 is is $173, while the 4TB model is $318. The Disk Pro is currently nearly $100 more expensive ($269) for the 1TB model, and more than double the Crucial drive at the 4TB capacity ($669). Of course, the X9 Pro doesn't come with a built-in hub or a magnetic back, but it is about half the size of Sharge's drive, and a comparable compact hub costs around $20-$30. So you're definitely paying a price premium for the Disk Pro's feature-packed versatility.

The voracious hardware demands on AI hyperscalers have been driving up prices (and driving down availability) of all kinds of PC hardware for half a year now. If you’re after a new external SSD, prices have so far nearly doubled from their all-time lows. But compared to the price of RAM, an RTX 5090, or an internal SSD, spending 70-80% more for external storage than you would have paid this time last year is a relative bargain.

And if you do need a new external drive, you might want to buy one soon. Because new drive launches in 2026 seem to be few and far between, as we should expect given the current demands on the supply of flash storage. And it seems likely that the few companies that are launching new external drives may be having to make do with some… less-than-ideal NAND. Exhibit A: Take a look at the sustained writes from this Orico drive I recently reviewed.

In our real-world file transfer test, it was at least in the range of other drives of its class.

But when it comes to sustained write speeds, the results were the worst I’ve seen for any SSD since I started testing external storage for Tom’s Hardware. We use Iometer to hammer the SSD with sequential writes for 15 minutes to measure the size of the write cache and performance after the cache is saturated.

Keep in mind that we tested a 512GB review sample, so the faster SLC cache will be larger on higher-capacity models. But if and when you do enough fast writing to hit the native NAND speed, you are looking at writes in the 60-80 MB/s range – with occasional dips below 50 MB/s.

This performance was so low that I reached out to Orico to make sure this was the expected speed and we weren’t dealing with a faulty drive. A representative told me that, while higher-capacity models would have more SLC cache and perform slightly better overall, “the product is functioning normally and there are no quality issues.”

In short, the drive was working as expected, while delivering sustained write speeds that are worse than hard drive write speeds, and even worse than many of the best flash drives we’ve tested. I had to get a closer look.

Opening the BookDrive

Prying the BookDrive open, the controller for the internal M.2 drive is a DRAMless Maxiotek map1202C, which Google tells me has been used in various drives going back as far as 2019. I couldn’t identify the maker of the flash, though. Neither the two alphanumeric strings silkscreened on the NAND packages showed up in search results, and there doesn’t seem to be another label underneath what’s on the surface of the chips.

But regardless of who made them, the flash in this “new” external SSD has the slowest write performance of any solid-state drive I’ve tested in at least a decade – and possibly ever. Even Intel’s 2008-era X25-M internal SSD managed to hit 72.2 MB/s writes in our testing — I didn’t start testing SSDs until sometime in 2009.

External storage in 2026

Granted, the surprisingly bad performance of one recent drive may not definitively tell us a whole lot about all the external storage drives launching in 2026. But we’re already in mid-March, and Sandisk is the only major SSD company I’m aware of that has announced new portable drives this year. We’re awaiting those SSDs for testing, and I fully expect them to perform much better than the Orico drive above.

But Sandisk’s new mid-range (20 Gbps) Extreme V3 drive sells for $459.99 direct from SanDisk (supposedly marked down from $574.99). And given the 20 Gbps interface bandwidth cap, how much better could that new drive be than Crucial’s X10 Pro drive that I tested (and was generally impressed by) back in 2023? Parent company Micron may have publicly ditched its consumer-focused Crucial brand in favor of the lucrative AI market late last year, but the X10 Pro is still readily available, and at a current $259 for the 2TB model, it’s priced $200 (just shy of 44%) less than Sandisk’s brand-new drive at the same capacity.

It seems pretty safe to assume that any new external SSDs from big-name brands will be priced similarly to Sandisk’s recently announced drives. Because, from a business standpoint, any stock that flash companies are holding back from their eager AI customers to put into consumer products is probably a financial risk. And any new product from smaller drive makers (generally those who aren’t making their own flash), if there are many new products at all, will have to make do with whatever scrap flash is available that both AI companies and the flash makers themselves don’t want. Chances are, both the performance and the endurance of the flash in those drives will be questionable at best.

Buy soon, and consider an older SSD

In short, if you need a new solid-state external drive, I would advise looking at something that came out more than six months ago (before the rise of AI hyperscaler demand), that has been thoroughly tested (by Tom’s Hardware or some other site you trust), and that is still available at a reasonable price. Our Best External SSD page has six great solid-state options that we’ve tested.

Because who knows how long the stock of those older drives is going to last? While some new drives this year may be a little faster, they’re almost certainly going to be significantly more expensive than what’s available now. Any new drives from smaller companies may fail to meet even basic SSD performance expectations from several years ago. If you wait long enough and the market doesn’t improve, you may be stuck buying a drive that both costs much more and performs much worse than what’s available now.

There are now more than a few external SSDs with magnetic backs, designed to snap onto iPhones (and a few Android phones) to make direct recording to drives easier. Corsair's excellent 40 Gbps EX400U does this, as does the Orico BookDrive P10Plus we're looking at here. The Orico drive adds another feature I haven't seen on other portable SSDs: a second USB-C port that supports 100W PD passthrough, so you can charge your phone or laptop through the drive while using it.

That's probably a more useful feature for those recording long-form video from their phones than it is for laptop users, but it is at least an interesting idea thatI haven't seen on a standalone external SSD before.

The other unique aspect of this drive turns out to be its sustained write performance. On most of our benchmarks, the drive performed about as we'd expect for a 10 Gbps SSD. But our sustained write test revealed some serious speed issues once you blow past the faster cache. Granted, our 512GB review unit likely has less cache than higher-capacity models, and many mainstream workloads are bursty enough that you'll never (or at least nearly never see the true speed of the native flash. But if you do, you can expect sustained writes that, while still generally fast enough to record 4K / 60 Hz video, is slower than a modern hard drive – and even some flash drives.

Orico BookDrive P10Plus (512GB) specifications

Design and accessories

Externally, the BookDrive P10Plus has some interesting things going for it, like a nice silver metal shell, a magnet built into the back to attach to compatible smartphones, and a 100W PD charging pass-through port. This lets you charge your laptop / smartphone and use your drive while only having a single cable connected to your device, which can certainly be handy.

The included cable, though, is only about 5 inches long, which is better for phone use. It is a 20 Gbps cable, despite the drive only being capable of 10 Gbps speeds. That at least makes the cable useful for other, faster devices. And it's a nice flat, rubberized cable that feels like it should last.

The drive itself ships empty, and there is no mention of software, either in the box or on Orico's site. You do, though, get a pair of magnetic rings in the box, in case your smartphone doesn't support MagSafe / Qi2 on Android. But that's it for accessories.

Comparison products

Despite ongoing datacenter-related issues driving up standalone SSD prices, the market is still saturated with older 10 Gbps external SSDs at somewhat reasonable prices. And that makes things tough for Orico's drive. At $184 for the 2TB model (which at least makes more sense than the $159 1TB version), it has to compete with excellent 10 Gbps options like the Crucial X9 Pro (which we tested alongside the X10 Pro in 2023), which was $172 for the 2TB model when we wrote this. And sure, the Crucial drive doesn't have the magnetic back and the passthrough charging. But it's also less than half the size of the BookDrive, and as we are about to see, the older Crucial drive performs much better.

Storage Testbed

In early 2025, we updated our external storage testbed to an AMD Ryzen 7600X-based PC with an Asus ROG Crosshair X870E Hero motherboard, installed in Lian Li’s Lancool 217 case. This was done in part because we needed a system with native USB4 support for upcoming drives (like this one).

All the drives in the charts below have been re-tested on the new X870E system, with the exception of the final Iometer sustained sequential test. That benchmark is less about top speed and more about how long a drive can write before depleting any fast cache onboard. We also updated to CrystalDiskMark 8, rather than the older (and non-comparable) version 7 we used on the previous testbed.

Trace Testing - PCMark 10 Storage Benchmark

PCMark 10 is a trace-based benchmark that uses a wide-ranging set of real-world traces from popular applications and everyday tasks to measure the performance of storage devices.

Orico's BookDrive started out our testing looking quite good. Its score of 1221 put it just behind the fastest 10 Gbps drives we've tested (both from Crucial), and well ahead of big-name brands like Samsung and SK hynix.

Transfer Rates – DiskBench

In this real-world file transfer test, the Orico BookDrive lands in the lower-middle portion of our charts, competing with Kioxia's 10 Gbps Exceria drive, but falling slightly behind.

Synthetic Testing CrystalDiskMark

CrystalDiskMark (CDM) is a free and easy-to-run storage benchmarking tool that SSD companies commonly use to assign product performance specifications. It gives us insight into how each device handles different file sizes. We run this test at its default settings.

Moving back to synthetic tests, the Orico drive lands last in synthetic reads and writes, but it's still close on the heels of SK hynix's Beetle and Samsung's T9.

But looking at small file performance, the Orico drive jumps back up the charts, landing in third place among 10 Gbps drives on reads and is neck-and-neck with the best in its class when it comes to writes.

Sustained Write Performance

A drive's rated write specifications are only a piece of the performance picture. Most external SSDs (just like their internal counterparts) implement a write cache, or a fast area of flash, programmed to perform like faster SLC, that absorbs incoming data.

Sustained write speeds often suffer tremendously when the workload saturates the cache and slips into the "native" TLC or QLC flash. We use Iometer to hammer the SSD with sequential writes for 15 minutes to measure the size of the write cache and performance after the cache is saturated.

Ouch. We've weeded out some of the competition here, to make this chart more legible, but that doesn't exactly help Orico's BookDrive. Its performance was fine on this test for the first 140 seconds or so, hovering in the mid-900 MB/s range. But after the drive's cache was used up, its performance cratered into the 60-80 MB/s range for the rest of the test, occasionally dipping below 50 MB/s. Now, for this drive's primary purpose of recording video from a smartphone, that should still generally be OK so long as you aren't straying much beyond 4K/60. But note that even the Kingston DataTraveler Max, which is one of the best flash drives, did noticeably better on this sustained write test. And the Crucial X9 hovered at or above the mid-900 Mbps range for the duration of this test, making its sustained write speed about 14x faster than the Orico drive, while costing about $12 less.

To be fair, the Orico drive suffers somewhat here from the smaller 512GB capacity that the company sent for testing. The competing SSDs were tested at 1 or 2TB capacities, and an Orico rep told us that the SLC cache is configured to be roughly 20% of the drive's total capacity. But a larger SLC-style would only delay / mask what is clearly extremely slow native write performance. You might not notice it in many mainstream workloads, but if you do lots of large writes, this is definitely not the drive for you.

Bottom Line

Orico's BookDrive P10PLUS brings passthrough charging and MagSafe support to an otherwise saturated and, frankly, boring 10 Gbps external storage field. Its features are welcome, particularly for smartphone users. And its performance in bursty tasks is at least decent. But its sustained write speeds scrape the bottom of the barrel of performance that we've seen from competing drives in recent years. That, combined with a price that's much more than big-name competition that's faster, makes it hard not to judge this book by the flash that is under its cover.

MORE: Best SSDs

MORE: Best External SSDs

MORE: Best SSD for the Steam Deck

OWC’s ThunderBlade X12 already stands toe-to-toe with the best external SSDs on the market, earning a reputation for speed, reliability, and robust performance. Now, OWC has taken its external RAID solution to the next level, doubling its previous maximum capacity from an impressive 96TB to a groundbreaking 192TB. The massive upgrade aims to satisfy the growing storage demands of filmmakers, video editors, and creative professionals.

To achieve this monumental 192TB capacity, OWC engineered the ThunderBlade X12 with an array of twelve M.2 PCIe 4.0 SSDs, each boasting a massive 16TB of storage. While OWC has not disclosed the exact SSD models used in this high-end setup, it’s clear that the company is likely leveraging enterprise-class drives, given that there aren't any 16TB mainstream M.2 SSDs yet. For example, Exascend's PE4 series is among the very few that can deliver such extraordinary capacity in the compact M.2 2280 form factor. OWC has used its own Aura Pro IV drives for the ThunderBlade X12 in the past, so that's a possibility too.

Out of the box, the ThunderBlade X12 is configured for maximum speed with RAID 0, but its true versatility shines through its support for a full spectrum of RAID levels, from RAID 0 to RAID 10. This flexibility allows users to tailor their storage for optimal performance, enhanced redundancy, or a balanced combination of both, depending on their workflow requirements.

OWC ThunderBlade X12 Specifications

The ThunderBlade X12 pushes the boundaries of performance, offering blazing-fast sequential read and write speeds up to 6,500 MB/s. Notably, OWC reports that the 192TB configuration can even achieve peak write speeds of up to 6,600 MB/s—an impressive feat for a storage solution of this scale. Even under sustained workloads, the external RAID solution maintains write speeds around 5,990 MB/s, ensuring smooth, uninterrupted data transfers during demanding tasks.

The ThunderBlade X12 harnesses the power of Intel’s JHL9480 Thunderbolt 5 controller (codenamed Barlow Ridge), enabling next-generation connectivity and blazing transfer speeds. Equipped with two Thunderbolt 5 ports, the X12 delivers data transfer rates up to an astonishing 80 Gb/s. The interface supports a wide range of high-performance setups, allowing users to connect up to two stunning 8K displays at 120 Hz or three crisp 4K displays at an ultra-smooth 144 Hz. For even greater flexibility, the ThunderBlade X12 enables daisy-chaining of up to five additional Thunderbolt devices, making it the ultimate hub for creative studios, professional workflows, and power users.

The ThunderBlade X12 is set to make its debut in 2026, though OWC has not yet announced an official release date. Perhaps the biggest question on everyone’s mind is the price tag for the unprecedented 192TB configuration. While OWC hasn’t revealed the cost, a glance at previous models provides some context. The jump from 48TB to 96TB saw prices increase by a little over half, suggesting that the 192TB version could reasonably be expected to land around $30,999.99—assuming market conditions remain stable. However, the ongoing global NAND shortage and rising flash memory costs could push the final price even higher.

The AI data center hardware crunch has already come for your RAM, and it's coming for your flash storage soon. So if you've been searching for a storage deal, this Cyber Monday might be the best time to strike for months or years.

At B&H, you can pick up the roomy and speedy 20Gbps X10 Pro 4TB Portable SSD for just $209.99 with a $60 coupon. That brings this excellent drive back down to a price we haven't seen on Amazon since December 2023, when it was new.

• Check out the deal at B&H

If you find yourself needing extra storage for your games or for moving data between devices without a network connection, a portable storage solution is a nice thing to have. Smaller is better for portability, but it doesn't have to equal less capacity. Today's deal is on a 4TB external SSD that you can connect via USB-C to all manner of devices, from your games console to your mobile phone, to the usual laptops and desktop PC, or even your cameras. And if you have the right ports on your device (USB 3.2 Gen 2 2x2), you can reach up to 20 Gbps.

The X10 Pro measures approximately 2.5 inches and features a solid metal chassis rated IP55 for dust and water resistance. It also advertises drop resistance from heights no greater than 7.5 feet, which should more than cover the average use case. Inside the chassis is a small SSD with speedy read and write speed transfer rates up to 2100MB/s over USB 3.2. The X10 Pro uses a Type-C USB connection and cable.

The X10 Pro was one of the fastest portable SSD drives that we had tested at the time of our review in 2023, and we awarded it an Editor's Choice award for its top-notch 20Gbps performance, compact, solid-feeling shell, and reasonable pricing at launch. Check out our review of Crucial's X10 Pro for more information on this handy little SSD.

More Cyber Monday Tech Deals

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Kingston Technology has announced its first cable-free SSD. It will hope it has doubled the chances of its debut product getting a warm reception by fitting dual captive USB-A and –C connectors, one at either end of this high-performance memory stick. Kingston's Dual Portable SSD Storage Solution products are available right now. The firm’s handy USB 3.2 Gen 2 dual-interface SSD thumb drives are priced between $97 for a 512GB, and $239 for a whopping 2TB model. We might as well also mention, the Goldilocks 1TB model is $144. But, whichever you choose, they all boast “Up to 1,050MB/s read, 950MB/s write” speeds.

• Buy the 512GB Kingston Dual Portable SSD on Amazon
• Buy the 1TB Kingston Dual Portable SSD on Amazon
• Buy the 2TB Kingston Dual Portable SSD on Amazon

The recommended use case for these compact, flexibly interfaced drives is as an affordable, reliable, portable solution for data back-ups and transfers. Specifically, Kingston reckons the Dual Portable SSDs are a good choice “for large files, high-res photos and 4K videos.” It looks like a humble flash drive, albeit with a compact, durable metal casing, but this Kingston offers much better performance than a budget alternative might deliver.

“More and more consumers are looking to take their data into their own hands,” said Liny Cheliyan, Business Manager - Prosumer Flash and SSD Kingston EMEA. “Now with the convenience of Kingston’s Dual Portable SSD, users can do just that and easily transfer, share, or back up their important files across a variety of USB-A and USB-C devices.”

In addition to the dual-interface flexibility, the broad OS support of the Kingston Dual Portable SSDs will be welcomed by those carting their precious data between systems, places, and platforms. Checking the official specs table data, above, you can see users can easily transfer data between diverse platforms - as long as they sport either a USB-A or USB-C connector (or have an adaptor).

These devices look pretty durable, too, which is desirable for easily portable objects that may find themselves rattling around in bags, pockets, or worse. We'd have liked to see some kind of water/dust resistance added to the specs, but the cold/heat durability is welcome.

Kingston is giving buyers of its class as a premium portable flash solution a five-year warranty with free tech support.

Nextorage's innovative NX-PFS1PRO portable SSD delivers competitive performance comparable to the best external SSDs on the market while also prioritizing data security. The manufacturer has integrated an extensive array of security features into the NX-PFS1PRO to safeguard your valuable data from unauthorized access. Nextorage has also equipped the drive with a compact screen, enabling users to monitor transfer speeds, the drive's operating temperature, and its health status. This feature is advantageous as it provides notifications when data backup is required.

The NX-PFS1PRO incorporates hardware encryption and is equipped with a self-protection feature designed to immediately erase all data on the SSD in the event of unauthorized access. Additionally, the drive is endowed with logging functionalities that record all authentication attempts, including details such as the target, date, and time of each event. Multiple methods are available to unlock the NX-PFS1PRO.

You can unlock the NX-PFS1PRO using a contactless IC card, such as employee ID cards. Nextorage emphasizes that customers must supply their own contactless IC card with NFC functionality to utilize this feature. Alternatively, the portable SSD may also be unlocked via dedicated software by entering a password when the NX-PFS1PRO is connected to a computer.

The NX-PFS1PRO also supports wireless unlocking. Essentially, the SSD connects to your network, enabling access through password entry via a web browser, thus allowing operation from any device, ranging from a tablet to a smartphone. Furthermore, a more advanced method involves configuring a designated access point. For instance, you may specify a connection zone in your office, and once the drive enters it, it will automatically unlock.

The NX-PFS1PRO provides sequential read and write speeds of up to 2 GB/s. The device utilizes a USB 3.2 Gen 2 x 2 (20 Gbps) Type-C port for communication with the host device. This port supports PD pass-through charging up to 100W, facilitating data transfer and power delivery through a single port, which is particularly advantageous if the computer is equipped with only one USB Type-C port.

The NX-PFS1PRO measures 2.6 x 0.7 x 3.9 inches (65 x 17 x 99.5 mm) and weighs 0.3 pounds (120 g), rendering it highly portable due to its compact size and light weight. It is slightly larger than a credit card and comfortably fits within the palm of the hand. The device is rated IP54 for dust and water resistance. Additionally, it is capable of withstanding drops from heights of up to 4.3 feet (1.3 meters) and exhibits resistance to shocks and vibrations.

The NX-PFS1PRO arrives in four capacities: 1TB, 2TB, 4TB, and 8TB. Nextorage markets these models at prices of $310, $387, $574, and $1,165, respectively, inclusive of taxes. The external SSD includes a 3-year limited warranty.

SanDisk has been around since the very beginnings of flash memory, and the company has been pushing out external SSDs for over a decade, with at least one big bump along the way. But after recently splitting from WD, the company is still pushing out impressive drives, with the internal M.2-based SN8100 landing as our top PCIe 5.0 pick on our list of the best SSDs.

Does SanDisk have another hit on its hands with its latest external drive, the somewhat awkwardly named "Extreme Pro with USB4"? It’s certainly a nice-looking drive that feels premium (though it is kinda large). And the promised speeds of up to 3,800 MB/s reads and 3,700 MB/s writes look good on paper, as does the 5-year warranty (which may assuage some lingering fears about the company’s drive reliability issues).

We’ll have to put the drive through our usual slate of benchmark testing to see if it earns its fairly high asking price. The 2 TB model we tested currently sells for $279, which is about $70 more than our current favorite USB4 SSD, Corsair’s EX400U. Before we get to testing, here are the specs for the drive, direct from SanDisk:

SanDisk Extreme Pro USB4 Specifications

SanDisk Extreme Pro USB4 design

SanDisk doesn’t try to lure you in with Adobe trials like LaCie, or include extra cables or accessories that you’ll probably lose before you find a use for them. And honestly, that’s fine. Inside the box, you’ll find the drive, a roughly 11-inch USB-C-to-USB-C cable, and the usual paperwork – that’s it.

The drive itself is coated in a soft-touch rubber on the sides and bottom, with diagonal ridges along the front, orange accents along the edges, and a hole in one corner so you can clip it to a bag or something else with a carabiner. The USB Type-C port resides on the bottom edge, also circled in orange.

Overall, the drive looks and feels premium, arguably more so than any drive I’ve tested in years. SanDisk says it has an IP65 rating for water resistance and that it should survive drops up to two meters. That said, while it’s thin at under 12 mm, it’s substantially bigger and heavier (172.37 grams) than most other modern drives.

Comparison drives

Corsair’s competing EX4000U USB4 drive weighs about half as much (92 grams) and is also about half the size, though it is a little thicker and certainly doesn’t feel as nice as the SanDisk drive. LaCie’s Rugged SSD4 (also a USB4 drive) is bulkier, thanks to its orange rubber life jacket, but still shorter than the SanDisk drive and also lighter, at 109 grams.

It’s not like the SanDisk drive is going to weigh your bag down or won’t fit in most pockets. But it is the largest external single-drive SSD I’ve reviewed or used in years.

Storage testbed

In early 2025, we updated our external storage testbed to an AMD Ryzen 7600X-based PC with an Asus ROG Crosshair X870E Hero motherboard, installed in Lian Li’s Lancool 217 case. This was done in part because we needed a system with native USB4 support for upcoming drives (like this one).

All the drives in the charts below have been re-tested on the new X870E system, with the exception of the final Iometer sustained sequential test. That benchmark is less about top speed and more about how long a drive can write before depleting any fast cache onboard. We also updated to CrystalDiskMark 8, rather than the older (and non-comparable) version 7 we used on the previous testbed.

Trace Testing - PCMark 10 Storage Benchmark

PCMark 10 is a trace-based benchmark that uses a wide-ranging set of real-world traces from popular applications and everyday tasks to measure the performance of storage devices.

In this first test, the LaCie SSD4 landed first, but SanDisk’s Extreme Pro USB4 wasn’t far behind, while Corsair’s USB4 drive was a distant third. But that’s not a dynamic that will hold for most of our tests, especially when it comes to write speed.

Transfer Rates – DiskBench

In this real-world file transfer test, SanDisk’s drive comes in first on reads, followed by LaCie’s USB4 drive, and then Corsair drive. But note that the Corsair EX400U nearly doubles the other two drives when it comes to writing files. This disparity was big enough that I ran the test on the SanDisk drive several times and, after achieving similar results, pulled out the Corsair and re-ran it on this test. Again, the results were effectively the same. At least in this real-world 50GB write test, the Corsair drive is significantly speedier.

Synthetic Testing CrystalDiskMark

CrystalDiskMark (CDM) is a free and easy-to-run storage benchmarking tool that SSD companies commonly use to assign product performance specifications. It gives us insight into how each device handles different file sizes. We run this test at its default settings.

Switching back to synthetic tests, the SanDisk drive drops to third when it comes to sequential reads, behind the Corsair and the LaCie. But the SanDisk drive nearly matched its first-place competitor on sequential writes.

Small file read performance sees SanDisk’s Extreme Pro USB4 on top in reads, with the LaCie Rugged SSD Pro4 slipping to fourth place. But again, the Corsair drive stands out in write performance here, with the SanDisk drive surprisingly in second-to-last place.

Sustained Write Performance

A drive's rated write specifications are only a piece of the performance picture. Most external SSDs (just like their internal counterparts) implement a write cache, or a fast area of flash, programmed to perform like faster SLC, that absorbs incoming data.

Sustained write speeds often suffer tremendously when the workload saturates the cache and slips into the "native" TLC or QLC flash. We use Iometer to hammer the SSD with sequential writes for 15 minutes to measure the size of the write cache and performance after the cache is saturated.

Immediately out of the gate, the SanDisk drive looks stunning, writing just below 3,500 MB/s, with only the LaCie Rugged SSD Pro4 getting close, starting just below 3,300 MB/s. But both drives’ performance falls off pretty quickly, with the LaCie dropping to the 1,600 MB/s range after less than 20 seconds. The SanDisk drive hung on at top speed for almost three minutes before dropping to a slower speed of around 1,100 MB/s for about five more minutes, then dropping again, to around 800 MB/s for the rest of our test.

The Corsair EX4000U, meanwhile, never managed to write above just 1,800 MB/s, and dropped to the 1,550-1,650 range after about 20 seconds – but it maintained that speed through the duration of our test (and even longer for a full 30 minutes), while the SanDisk drive was slower than the Corsair after just a few minutes of sustained writes.

In short, while the SanDisk drive is much faster at bursty and mainstream workloads, the Corsair drive is technically faster for big, drive-filling tasks that tend to fall into the “pro” category. That’s a shame from a marketing perspective, given that SanDisk has put Pro in its USB4 drive’s name, while Corsair has not.

Bottom line

SanDisk’s Extreme Pro USB4 drive is fast for mainstream tasks, and I’d argue it’s one of the nicest-looking (and feeling) drives I’ve tested in years. But it costs substantially more than both the Corsair and LaCie USB4 drives we’ve tested recently, while often falling behind them in real-world writes. That makes SanDisk’s USB4 drive hard to recommend, especially to the kind of “pro” users that SanDisk’s marketing is attempting to appeal to.

The Extreme Pro With USB4 is fine for carrying around and backing up files. But if you are often filling up your drive with high-resolution video or images and dumping them to local storage via USB4 or Thunderbolt, you’re better off looking elsewhere. Corsair’s competing EX400U remains our favorite USB4 SSD for most people – helped by the fact that it costs about $70 less at the same 2TB capacity.

It's that time of year again, when we are on the cusp of big tech sales from Amazon, Newegg, Best Buy, Walmart, and more. There have been quite a few early deals popping up on the radar beforehand, and yet again today, we have found another sumptuous deal on some excellent storage tech.

If, like me, you're constantly saving, installing, backing up, and just generally moving data all around the place, then you're already well aware of how useful fast and easily transportable storage can be a lifesaver and all-around convenience. At Amazon, ahead of next week's Amazon Big Deals Days sales event, Crucial has already stripped the price of its X10 Pro 2TB Portable SSD down to just $149.99. This brings a saving of $59 (28%), and is one of the lowest prices it's been on sale at. It's not an all-time low, though, as that was an amazing $129 back in November 2023, when SSD prices hit rock bottom.

• Check out the deal at Amazon

If you find yourself needing some extra storage for your games or moving data between devices outside of a network connection, then having a portable storage solution is a nice thing to have. Smaller is better for portability, but it doesn't have to equal less capacity. Today's deal is on a 2TB external SSD that you can connect via USB-C to all manner of devices, from your games console to your mobile phone, to the usual laptops and desktop PC, or even your cameras. And if you have the right ports on your device (USB 3.2 Gen 2 2x2), you can get up to 20Gb/s speeds.

The X10 Pro measures approximately 2.5 inches and features a solid and rugged chassis that's rated for IP55 dust and water resistance. It also advertises a drop resistance from heights no greater than 7.5 feet, which should more than cover the average use-case scenario. Inside the chassis is a small SSD with speedy read and write speed transfer rates up to 2100MB/s over USB 3.2. The X10 Pro uses a Type-C USB connection and cable.

The X10 Pro was one of the fastest portable SSD drives that we had tested at the time of review, and we awarded it an Editor's Choice award for its top-notch 20Gb/s performance, compact, solid-feeling shell, and reasonable pricing at launch. Check out our review of Crucial's X10 Pro for more information on this handy little SSD.

If you're looking for more savings, check out our Best PC Hardware deals for a range of products, or dive deeper into our specialized SSD and Storage Deals, Hard Drive Deals, Gaming Monitor Deals, Graphics Card Deals, or CPU Deals pages.

Apacer has introduced the new AS712 (AP1TBAS712BY-1) portable SSD to compete with the best external SSDs available on the market. The AS712 incorporates an essential oil diffuser, which Apacer claims is the first of its kind in the world for an external SSD.

Apacer has placed a strong emphasis on eco-friendliness throughout the AS712, from its construction to its packaging. The company carved the AS712 from natural bamboo and aluminum alloy. Meanwhile, the piece of bamboo that it attaches to or cradle, as Apacer calls it, is made from aluminum alloy, recycled plastic, natural bamboo, and reservoir silt. Since the AS712 is made from bamboo, each drive has its own distinct texture and color tones.

While the external SSD appears aesthetically pleasing and is likely to attract nature enthusiasts, the innovation extends beyond the bamboo design to include the integrated essential oil diffuser. We suspect that the heat generated by the drive or stone is what diffuses the oil. Apacer recommends applying one or two drops of natural essential oil either to the surface of the SSD or the diffuser stone. The amount of oil used should not exceed the recommended amount since overapplication may damage the SSD.

It’s not quite fair to say if you’ve seen one LaCie external drive, you’ve seen them all. But the orange silicon bumper and silver internal aluminum shell of LaCie’s Rugged SSD4 looks to be the same chassis used in last year’s Rugged Mini SSD, and similar to the company’s earliest Rugged drives, dating back 20 years. But this latest Rugged drive sports a fast 40 Gbps interface, making it a competitor to one of the best external SSDs, Corsair’s USB4-based EX400U.

Perhaps because of the brand’s historical tendency toward Mac users, LaCie isn’t expressly calling this a USB4 drive, instead stating the drive has a “USB 40 Gbps port.” But I tested it on our Asus ROG Crosshair X870E Hero-based storage testbed over USB4 and spot-checked performance on an M4 MacBook Air with Thunderbolt 4; the Rugged SSD4 was similarly speedy on both machines. And that’s how LaCie seems to be marketing the drive, as one that supports all recent versions of Thunderbolt and USB, giving you fast performance on whatever system you plug the drive into. For the most part, it seems like LaCie has delivered on that front, making this drive more universally appealing than its Thunderbolt 5-based Rugged SSD Pro5 that launched earlier this year.

We’ll have to put the drive through our usual slate of benchmark testing to see if it earns its fairly high asking price – the 4 TB model we tested is expected to sell for $479. But first, here are the specs for the drive, direct from LaCie:

LaCie Rugged SSD4 specifications

LaCie Rugged SSD4 Design and accessories

The LaCie Rugged branding comes with the requisite IP54 rating for protection against dust and water splashes (so long as you have the silicon plug over the port). And LaCie says the drive is also built to withstand drops up to 3 meters as well as up to 2,000 pounds of pressure. The drive certainly feels rigid, with or without its orange silicon protection.

In the box, you get the drive and the removable orange silicon bumper, along with a USB-C-to-USB-C cable that’s just shy of a foot long. The cable is also orange, which is helpful if you’re swimming in a sea of cables, most of which don’t have the bandwidth for a drive this fast. The cable also has “40 Gbps 240W” embossed on each end, indicating its speed and charge rating. Given its length, though, it’s unlikely you’re going to want to charge a laptop or anything more power-hungry with this short cable.

Software

As with previous LaCie (and parent company, Seagate) devices, the three-year warranty also comes with the company’s Rescue Data Recovery service, should the drive physically fail during the warranty period. Two months of Adobe’s Creative Cloud Pro is also included, though LaCie stipulates this isn’t valid in all countries, so check before buying if the software trial appeals to you.

Comparison products

LaCie has never been a particularly value-focused brand. And the Rugged SSD4’s launch prices ($134 for the 1 TB version, $249 for the 2 TB model, and $479 for the top 4 TB capacity that we tested) certainly aren’t going to compete with budget or mainstream external drives. But the SSD4 is cheaper than the company’s Pro5 Thunderbolt 5 drive (currently selling for $524 for 4 TB). Corsair’s USB4 EX400U is significantly cheaper, though, at $109 for 1 TB, $179 for 2 TB, and $309 for 4 TB.

Whether or not the LaCie drive is worth the extra $25-$170 (depending on capacity) over the Corsair drive will depend on your performance needs. But as we’ll soon see in testing, the LaCie drive is significantly faster than the Corsair in many of our benchmarks.

The LaCie Rugged SSD4 is also smaller than the company’s hard drive days, at 105 x 67 x 18 mm and 109 grams. But that is still larger and heavier than most of its external storage competition. It’s about twice the size of Corsair’s EX400U, and Crucial’s 20 Gbps X10 drive is less than a quarter the size of the LaCie. The Corsair drive has an embedded metal ring for easily snapping on the back of an iPhone and a few Android phones, if that’s important to you.

Still, the LaCie drive is small enough to fit in most pants or backpack pockets, so it’s only bulky in comparison to smaller modern alternatives. I do wish the company could find a better solution than the untethered silicon USB-C plug, though, because I’d probably lose that within weeks of using the drive – if not days.

Storage testbed update

In early 2025, we updated our external storage testbed to an AMD Ryzen 7600X-based PC with an Asus ROG Crosshair X870E Hero motherboard, installed in Lian Li’s Lancool 217 case. This was done in part because we needed a system with native USB4 support for upcoming drives (like this one).

All the drives in the charts below have been re-tested on the new X870E system, with the exception of the final Iometer sustained sequential test, which is less about top speed and more about how long a drive can write before depleting any fast cache. We also updated to CrystalDiskMark 8, rather than the older (and non-comparable) version 7 we used on the previous testbed.

Trace Testing - PCMark 10 Storage Benchmark

PCMark 10 is a trace-based benchmark that uses a wide-ranging set of real-world traces from popular applications and everyday tasks to measure the performance of storage devices.

In this first test, the LaCie SSD4 was easily beaten by its slightly older, pricier, Thunderbolt 5-based sibling. But with a score of 1862, the SSD4 beat everything else here, including the USB4-based Corsair EX400U.

Transfer Rates – DiskBench

In this real-world file transfer test, the SSD4 drive looked even better, outpacing the LaCie TB5 drive in our Windows 11-based testing, and again beating everything else, including Corsair’s EX400U USB4 drive. In fact, the drive was so fast here (and elsewhere) that I had to adjust the axes of a few of our charts.

Synthetic Testing CrystalDiskMark

CrystalDiskMark (CDM) is a free and easy-to-run storage benchmarking tool that SSD companies commonly use to assign product performance specifications. It gives us insight into how each device handles different file sizes. We run this test at its default settings.

Once again, the LaCie Rugged SSD4 lands on top when it comes to reads, though just barely, and the Corsair USB4 drive managed to edge out a win on writes. But both tests are close enough that this benchmark is essentially a tie between the two USB4 drives.

Because we have seen Mac-focused drives perform much slower on PCs and vice versa, I also spot-checked the performance of the Rugged SSD4 on an M4 Macbook Air via its Thunderbolt 4 port, using AmorphousDiskMark (CrystalDiskMark doesn’t run on Macs), and got slower but still very fast sequential performance of 3,440 MBps reads and 3,093.57 MBps writes.

Small file performance racks up another win for LaCie’s Rugged SSD4. It again sticks close to the Corsair drive on reads. But when it comes to writes, it’s in its own league.

Sustained Write Performance

A drive's rated write specifications are only a piece of the performance picture. Most external SSDs (just like their internal counterparts) implement a write cache, or a fast area of flash, programmed to perform like faster SLC, that absorbs incoming data.

Sustained write speeds often suffer tremendously when the workload saturates the cache and slips into the "native" TLC or QLC flash. We use Iometer to hammer the SSD with sequential writes for 15 minutes to measure the size of the write cache and performance after the cache is saturated.

On the one hand, the LaCie Rugged SSD4 lasted just shy of a minute writing at its top speed, above 3,600 MB/s, but that’s enough time to move about 200 gigabytes of data. And after that, while the drive did slow its sustained write speed, it kept writing between 1,600 and 1,800 MB/s for the 15-minute duration of our test data, and actually for a full 30 minutes of our Iometer run without dropping any lower.

And that ‘slower’ write speed the SSD4 delivered is after its cache depletion is actually as fast or faster than most other drives’ peak write speed. So while it would be nice to see LaCie’s drive write longer at its apex, it’s hard to complain much when even the competing USB4 Corsair drive started off writing at just under 1,800 MB/s and quickly dropped into the 1,600-1,700 range.

Bottom line

LaCie’s Rugged SSD4 drive sits in an interesting spot. For Windows (and presumably Android) users with USB4, Corsair’s EX400U is nearly as fast in many of our tests, while costing as much as $170 less in the 4 TB model we tested on the LaCie side. And for Mac purists who have the latest hardware, LaCie’s Rugged SSD Pro5 is significantly faster if you have machines with a Thunderbolt 5 port.

That said, for creators and enthusiasts with production workflows or portable file needs that span multiple platforms, the LaCie Rugged SSD4 delivers the fastest performance we’ve seen. Add in the three years of included data recovery,(which you won’t get from Corsair), and the Rugged SSD4 is easy to recommend for those who need speed and peace of mind while working in Windows, macOS, and maybe Android and iOS as well (though we didn’t test the drive on the latter two platforms). While other drives perhaps make more sense for one OS or another, the SSD Pro4 is the best drive we’ve tested for those who want speed without having to think about what platform they’re plugging into.

Japanese memory manufacturer Kioxia doesn’t have the same kind of name recognition as its former parent company, Toshiba, which invented flash memory in the 1980s. But the spun-off company, renamed in 2019 as a combination of the Japanese word for ‘memory and the Greek word for ‘value,’ has remained a major player in cutting-edge solid-state storage, alongside Samsung, Micron / Crucial, SK hynix, and WD / SanDisk.

Kioxia largely sticks to selling flash, SSDs, and related technology to other companies, at least here in the United States. But when a representative from Kioxia Europe reached out about testing a consumer-focused external SSD, the Exceria Plus G2, I was curious to see what the drive was capable of and how it would stack up against the best external SSDs we’ve tested, despite the fact that this pocket-friendly drive isn’t officially available in the U.S.

As a 10 Gbps (USB 3.2 Gen2) SSD, I knew it wasn’t going to break any speed records, but how does this drive stand up against competing compact metal-shelled offerings like the SK hynix Beetle X31 and the various X9s and X10s from Crucial? Read on to see our benchmark results. But first, here are the specs for the Exceria Plus G2, direct from Kioxia:

Kioxia Exceria Plus G2 (2TB) specifications

Design and accessories

The black metal aluminum shell of the Kioxia Exceria Plus G2 feels very solid in my hand, and the convex top and bottom feel distinctive. This design may cause some complications, though, for those who like to use Velcro or other materials to stick their drives to the side of a camera, phone, or the lid of their laptop.

Kioxia thoughtfully includes both a USB-C-to-USB-A and a USB-C-to-USB-C cable along with the drive, both of which are about a foot long, including the plugs. A tiny activity light lives on the end of the drive, next to the USB-C port.

Pricing

You can find the Kioxia Exceria Plus G2 for sale in the U.S. via third-party sellers or on eBay, but generally not at competitive prices. At Amazon in the U.K., the 2TB model we tested was selling for £149 when I wrote this, with the 1TB version going for £93 and the 512GB capacity for £65. SK hynix’ competing Beetle X31 (another 10 Gbps drive with a metal shell), was selling for a little less: £137 for the 2TB model and £82 for the 1TB.

But both those drives are undercut in the U.K. by Crucial’s X9 Pro (which we tested alongside the X10 Pro), at just £108 in the 2TB capacity. The Crucial drive was on sale when I priced out these drives, but it seems clear that, at least in the U.K., Kioxia’s drive faces stiff competition when it comes to price.

Software

The drive itself arrives empty, but Kioxia does offer a downloadable SSD Utility on its website that lets you monitor drive health, update firmware if necessary, and password-protect the drive. It is a bit curious that the company doesn’t include an installer or at least a link on the drive itself, especially given that the Exceria Plus G2 features 256-bit AES hardware encryption. But the program is intuitively laid out and feature-packed, should you search it out and install it.

Comparison products

At 72 x 40 x 11.8 mm and 42 grams, the Exceria Plus G2 is smaller than many competing drives. The SK hynix Beetle X31 is thicker and heavier (74 X 46 X 14.8 mm, 53 grams), but Crucial’s X10, X10 Pro, and X9 drives remain among the smallest, at 65 x 50 x 10 mm and the same 42 grams as the Kioxia drive.

Beyond minute measuring contests, though, most major external SSDs are similarly pocket-friendly and light these days, unless you count models like LaCie’s Rugged SSD Pro, which is a bulky 150 grams thanks to its rubber exterior and the internal cooling necessary for Thunderbolt 5-class speeds.

Storage testbed update

Earlier in 2025, we updated our external storage testbed to an AMD Ryzen 7600X-based PC with an Asus ROG Crosshair X870E Hero motherboard, installed in Lian Li’s Lancool 217 case. This was done in part because we needed a system with native USB4 support for upcoming drives.

All the drives in the charts below have been re-tested on the new X870E system, with the exception of the final Iometer sustained sequential test, which is less about top speed and more about how long a drive can write before depleting any fast cache. We also updated to CrystalDiskMark 8, rather than the older (and non-comparable) version 7 we used on the previous testbed.

Trace Testing - PCMark 10 Storage Benchmark

PCMark 10 is a trace-based benchmark that uses a wide-ranging set of real-world traces from popular applications and everyday tasks to measure the performance of storage devices.

In this first test, the Kioxia drive didn’t exactly impress; It landed last among the drives we recently retested. That said, its score of 974 wasn’t far from most other 10 Gbps drives, which tend to top out around 1,150 points on this test.

Transfer Rates – DiskBench

In this real-world file transfer, the Kioxia Exceria G2 looked a little better, beating out the SK hynix Beetle X31 and Seagate’s flash-drive-like Ultra-Compact SSD.

Synthetic Testing CrystalDiskMark

CrystalDiskMark (CDM) is a free and easy-to-run storage benchmarking tool that SSD companies commonly use to assign product performance specifications. It gives us insight into how each device handles different file sizes. We run this test at its default settings.

In this best-case synthetic scenario on our overhauled testbed, the Kioxia drive managed to edge out three other drives, but landed slightly behind SK hynix and Crucial's competitors.

Small file performance is one area where the Kioxia drive shines. It lands behind the SK hynix Beetle X31 and Seagate Ultra-Compact SSD once again, but ahead of many other drives, including some with a faster 20 Gbps interface.

Sustained Write Performance

A drive's rated write specifications are only a piece of the performance picture. Most external SSDs (just like their internal counterparts) implement a write cache, or a fast area of flash, programmed to perform like fast SLC, that absorbs incoming data.

Sustained write speeds often suffer tremendously when the workload saturates the cache and slips into the "native" TLC or QLC flash. We use Iometer to hammer the SSD with sequential writes for 15 minutes to measure the size of the write cache and performance after the cache is saturated.

The Kioxia Exceria Plus G2 again looks good on this most demanding of tests, managing to write for close to 12 minutes at above 1,000 MB/s (and slightly above its rated write speed), before dropping below 400 MB/s for the remainder of our test. If you need something that can handle lengthier sustained writes than that, you should probably opt for something like the Crucial X9 Pro, or better yet, something with a faster USB interface if your systems support it.

Bottom line

With a solid, small metal shell, hardware-based encryption, solid (if not class-leading) 10 Gbps performance, and USB-C and USB-A cables included in the box, Kioxia Exceria Plus G2 is a decent option for backing up or transporting your important data. Whether or not it stands out is largely down to its price in your region, as it’s not officially available in the U.S. But if it costs less than competing drives like the SK hynix Beetle X31 or Crucial’s X9 where you live, it’s easy to recommend.

The SK hynix Beetle X31 2TB portable SSD is currently available at Amazon for one of its best prices to date. It has a recommended price of $199, but it typically sells for around $170. Today is the lowest price we've seen for it since the SSD first debuted—$118, which translates to around 6 cents per GB.

• Check out this deal on Amazon

We had the opportunity to review the SK hynix Beetle X31 portable 2TB SSD last year and generally liked our experience. The performance might not be the greatest for a drive in this class, but it's not bad at all when considering today's deal. This drive is intended for portabilit,y so if you're looking for something with mobility in mind, it's definitely worth a closer look.

Because this is an external drive, it uses a USB Type-A port for interface. To achieve the best possible performance, 10 Gbps, you'll need to use a USB 3.2 Gen 2 interface. This offer is for the 2TB SK hynix Beetle X31 portable SSD, but it also comes in 500GB and 1TB capacities. The read/write speed for the 2TB edition is 1050/1050 MBps when using the best interface possible.

This drive was designed with portability in mind, so it's not very large or heavy and comes in a protective shell with a distinctly round design, which likely lends itself to the name "Beetle". It measures 2.91 x 1.81 x 0.58 in and weighs 53g. A 3-year warranty from SK hynix supports the drive.

If you're looking for a portable SSD with decent performance that won't break the bank, this offer on the SK hynix Beetle 31 2TB is definitely worth considering. That said, check out our list of best SSDs to see what else is leading the market and get an idea of what specs to look out for when shopping.

If you're looking for more savings, check out our Best PC Hardware deals for a range of products, or dive deeper into our specialized SSD and Storage Deals, Hard Drive Deals, Gaming Monitor Deals, Graphics Card Deals, or CPU Deals pages.

If you’re looking for an external drive to expand the capacity of your laptop and get more done, now is your chance to do so at a discount. The 2TB Samsung T7 Portable SSD is now on sale for $113.99, giving you a 39% discount off its $187.99 MSRP and saving you $74. It’s also available in black, which is discounted at $119.99 from its $199.99 regular price, giving you 40% and saving you $80. Since this is the last day of Prime Day 2025, this is your last chance to grab this deal.

• Check out all the best SSD deals in Amazon's Prime Day Sale

This portable SSD gives you decent performance, with its USB 3.2 Gen 2 interface translating to 10Gbps transfer speed. This makes it suitable for 4K ProRes 60 fps recording on your iPhone, ensuring that you can continuously shoot videos without worrying that you’ll run out of space. It also uses PCIe NVME to deliver read and write speeds of up to 1,050 and 1,000 MB/s, respectively. It’s also secure with its built-in hardware-based AES 256-bit encryption. So, even if you misplace it, you have peace of mind that anyone trying to casually break into your files will have difficulty doing so.

The biggest drawback with this drive is that it uses DRAMless architecture, meaning its performance will lag behind some of its contemporaries. However, our review of the Samsung T7 Portable SSD found that it sits around the middle of the pack — this might not work for some high-performance applications for a few professionals, but it’s likely good enough for most users. And with the price drop, you’re getting more value out of this portable drive.

You had better act quickly if you need a portable SSD today, since this is a Prime Day deal, and today is the last day of Prime Day 2025. At this price, the 2TB Samsung T7 Portable SSD is cheaper than a few smaller drives, making it the better option. But if you need an internal SSD or maybe an external hard drive with even larger capacity, you should check out our Best Prime Day 2025 SSD deals while they’re still on sale.

We are working hard to find the best computer hardware deals for you this Amazon Prime Day. We cover the hottest deals in real-time at our Best Amazon Prime Day Deals Live page. If you're looking for more savings, check out our Amazon Prime Day deals for a range of products, or dive deeper into our specialized SSD and Storage Deals, Hard Drive Deals, Gaming Monitor Deals, Graphics Card Deals, or CPU Deals pages.

If you are seeking a compact and high-performance portable SSD, the Crucial X10 in 1TB, 2TB, 4TB, 6TB, and 8TB capacities are still on an excellent sale this Amazon Prime Day, but the sale is winding down, so you'll need to grab these quickly if you want to snag the discount. The Crucial X10 is presently available at a discount of up to 30%. Five different capacities are available for selection, offering significant savings up to $182 on the highest capacity model.

• SSDs from $59.99 on Amazon Prime Day

With dimensions of 2.53 x 1.93 x 0.37 inches and weighing only 0.08 pounds, the Crucial X10 is a highly portable drive that easily fits in the palm of your hand. It's one of those drives that you can put inside your pocket for on-the-go use. It boasts IP65 certification, ensuring dust and water resistance, as well as drop resistance of up to 9.8 feet. This means your data remains protected even if the drive is handled roughly.

The Crucial X10 provides sequential read speeds of up to 2,100 MB/s. Although Crucial does not disclose the sequential write performance for the drive, our benchmarks, which are shown below, indicate that it is capable of achieving speeds of 2,000 MB/s. Therefore, the Crucial X10 is twice as fast as the previous Crucial X9.

With that in mind, the Crucial X10 has demonstrated solid performance compared to its competitors. It's easily among the fastest 20 Gbps portable drives on the market.

Compatibility won't be an issue, either. The Crucial X10 is compatible with various devices and operating systems, including Windows, macOS, Android, iOS, Linux, and Chrome OS.

The Crucial X10 is an excellent choice for those who need a compact, fast, and durable portable SSD. Its availability in 1TB, 2TB, 4TB, 6TB, and 8TB options is convenient, ensuring you can find a model that fits your storage requirements. Crucial backs the X10 with a limited three-year warranty, so your investment is protected.

We are working hard to find the best computer hardware deals for you this Amazon Prime Day. If you're looking for more savings, check out our best early Amazon Prime Day deals for a range of products, or dive deeper into our specialized SSD and Storage Deals, Gaming Monitor Deals, Graphics Card Deals, or CPU Deals pages.

If you find yourself needing some extra storage for your games or moving data between devices outside of a network connection, then having a portable storage solution is a nice thing to have. Smaller is better for portability, but it doesn't also have to equal less capacity. Today's deal is on a 4TB external SSD that you can connect via USB C to all manner of devices, from your games console to your mobile phone, to the usual laptops and desktop PC, or even your cameras.

• SSDs from $59.99 on Amazon Prime Day

Head to Amazon for this early Prime Day deal and pick up the portable Crucial X9 Pro (4TB) external SSD for just $198. It's not the lowest price ever; that was $182 back in November 2023. The MSRP list price of this drive is $298, with the Camelizer Amazon price checker showing prices steadily fluctuating between $210 and $260.

The X9 Pro measures approximately 2.5 inches and features a solid and rugged plastic chassis that's rated for IP55 dust and water resistance. It also advertises a drop resistance from heights no greater than 7.5 feet, which should more than cover the average use-case scenario. Inside the chassis is a small SSD with speedy read and write speed transfer rates up to 1050MB/s over USB 3.2. The X9 Pro uses a Type-C USB connection and cable.

I have one of these handy drives and use it to store video that's been recorded from my phone. Large 4K video files quickly soak up my phone's valuable storage, so offloading them to the X9 Pro keeps my mobile speedy and makes it easier and faster to connect to my PC for video editing. The small size means I can just keep it in my pocket or attached to my keys while I'm out and about on an adventure.

Back in mid-2023, Crucial launched the X10 Pro, a tiny, slim USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 (20 Gbps) portable SSD with a black metal lid and enough performance and value to earn a spot on our best external SSDs page. Now Crucial is back with the X10, a drive that drops the Pro epithet and swaps the metal lid for a blue plastic shell that still manages to feel very solid.

The X10 also stands out for its plethora of capacities: 1, 2, 4, 6, and 8TB. Crucial sent us the 4TB model for testing, but the 6TB option is an unusual capacity that could fill a particular niche. Strangely though, the 6TB drive was selling for more than the 8TB model on Amazon when we wrote this.

As we’ll see in testing, the Crucial X10 bests its older sibling and most other 20 Gbps drives on performance and value. But here in mid-2025, USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 drives feel more niche than ever now that USB4 ports have become more popular. USB4 drives like Corsair’s EX400U can deliver as much as twice the speed and don’t cost much more at some capacities.

Crucial X10 (4TB) Specifications

Design and accessories

At roughly 2.5 x 2 inches and just over a third of an inch thick, Crucial’s X10 maintains the dimensions of the previous-gen X9 and X10 Pro, but it ditches a few grams (not that you’d notice) by switching from a metal top and sides to a plastic blue shell that leans more toward gray when not under photography lights. The design remains one of the smallest and most pocket-friendly options around, which is all the more impressive now that the company offers the X10 in up to 8TB capacities.

The included cable is a little over 9 inches long, but feels a bit short to me because the actual flexible parts of the cable are only about 6.5 inches long. The USB-C plugs and stiff housing make up the rest of the length. Personally, I prefer cables that are about a foot long – especially since most of the fast ports, at least on desktops, are found around the back of the PC.

Comparison products

In terms of performance in the 20 Gbps category, Lexar’s Professional SL600 is arguably the X10’s closest competitor in our charts below. The real problem for the X10, though, is that Crucial’s 40 Gbps EX400U doesn’t cost much more (at least at the lower capacities) while being a much faster drive in most respects (provided you have a USB4 port). Both the Lexar and Corsair are considerably larger, though. So if you need something speedy and tiny, Crucial’s X10 still looks good.

Storage testbed update

Earlier in 2025, we updated our external storage testbed to an AMD Ryzen 7600X-based PC with an Asus ROG Crosshair X870E Hero motherboard, installed in Lian Li’s Lancool 217 case. This was done in part because we needed a system with native USB4 support for upcoming drives.

All the drives in the charts below have been re-tested on the new X870E system, with the exception of the final Iometer sustained sequential test, which is less about top speed and more about how long a drive can write before depleting any fast cache. We also updated to CrystalDiskMark 8, rather than the older (and non-comparable) version 7 we used on the previous testbed.

Trace Testing - PCMark 10 Storage Benchmark

PCMark 10 is a trace-based benchmark that uses a wide-ranging set of real-world traces from popular applications and everyday tasks to measure the performance of storage devices.

In this first test, the Corsair X10 was the fastest USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 drive we’ve tested, edging past the previous-gen X10 Pro and Lexar’s SL600 drive. The early USB4 drive from ADATA (the SE920) also wasn’t much faster here. But of course, the recent USB4 Corsair drive and the Thunderbolt 5 drive from LaCie land on top, where they will stay for most of these tests.

Transfer Rates – DiskBench

In this real-world file transfer, the Corsair and LaCie are again the fastest, followed by the 20 Gbps Lexar and Team Group drives. While the Crucial X10 lands close to the middle on this test, its read and write speeds are again better than the older Crucial drives, and well balanced, unlike the Adata, which was extremely slow on writes.

Synthetic Testing CrystalDiskMark

CrystalDiskMark (CDM) is a free and easy-to-run storage benchmarking tool that SSD companies commonly use to assign product performance specifications. It gives us insight into how each device handles different file sizes. We run this test at its default settings.

In this best-case synthetic sequential scenario on our recently overhauled testbed, the Crucial X10 loses out slightly to the Team Group PD20 on read speeds, but easily beats it and the Lexar drive on writes, getting very close to 2 GBps.

Small file performance was the one area where the older X10 Pro didn’t excel, and while the new X10 does better on reads, it falls behind the lower-end X9 in our testing, and is in the lower half of our comparison chart on both reads and writes. Still, its performance is generally in the range of its 20 Gbps competition.

Sustained Write Performance

A drive's rated write specifications are only a piece of the performance picture. Most external SSDs (just like their internal counterparts) implement a write cache, or a fast area of flash, programmed to perform like faster SLC, that absorbs incoming data.

Sustained write speeds often suffer tremendously when the workload saturates the cache and slips into the "native" TLC or QLC flash. We use Iometer to hammer the SSD with sequential writes for 15 minutes to measure the size of the write cache and performance after the cache is saturated.

The Crucial X10 starts well ahead of other 20 Gbps drives here, hovering just under 2000 MBps, and it stays in that range for about six minutes and 40 seconds. That’s enough time to move about 800GB of data at the top end of the 3.2 Gen 2x2 bus, but then the drive crashes into the 200-300 MBps range, where it stays for the rest of our testing run.

Based on this, we wouldn’t qualify the X10 as a professional drive for those who need to fill up the entire drive quickly (and to be fair, neither does Crucial). But it’s still plenty fast for several minutes of constant writes, and faster than LaCie’s Thunderbolt 5 drive and Corsair’s USB4 SSD for a good chunk of this chart. For writing data sets smaller than about 1TB, the X10’s performance is solid.

Bottom line

With very good 20 Gbps performance, lots of capacity options, and a tiny, rugged-feeling IP65-rated shell, Crucial’s X10 is one of the best USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 drives you can buy, and should be especially appealing to those looking for a 6TB or 8TB option.

That said, USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 ports were never particularly popular, and faster USB4 and Thunderbolt 4 ports seem to already be much more common. If your system has one of those newer, speedier ports, or you just want a drive that’s more forward-looking, Corsair’s EX400U is much faster in most of our tests and is currently $5 cheaper at 1TB and $27 more expensive at 2TB. Step up to 4TB, though, and the Corsair USB4 drive is a tougher sell, as it costs $73 more than Crucial’s tiny X10.

MORE: Best SSDs

MORE: Best External SSDs

MORE: Best SSD for the Steam Deck

Silicon Motion has introduced its new single-chip controller for external solid-state drives that is designed to enable relatively inexpensive SSDs with a 40 Gb/s USB4 interface. The SM2324 controller can be used to build compact, low-power drives with up to 32TB capacity that offer a read throughput up to 4,000 MB/s.

Silicon Motion's SM2324 is a single-chip SSD controller based on two Arm Cortex-R5 cores that has four NAND channels with 32 CE targets that support 3D TLC and 3D QLC NAND devices with an up to 1,600 MT/s interface speed as well as a USB4 Gen3x2 (40 Gbps) host interface with Power Delivery 3.1. SMI claims that drives based on the SM2324 controller can achieve a sequential read performance of up to 4,000 MB/s and a sequential write performance of up to 3,809 MB/s (provided that there is enough cooling). The controller can address up to 32 TB of memory, which enables it to be used both for consumer and professional-grade external storage devices.

The SM2324 controller fully supports the company's latest NANDXtend LDPC ECC technology with a codeword size of 4 kilobytes (4096 bytes) to ensure compatibility with existing and upcoming 3D TLC and 3D QLC NAND memory.

On the security side, the controller also supports real-time full-drive encryption using AES 128/256-bit, complies with TCG Opal 2.0, and includes hardware SHA-384/256 and True Random Number Generator (TRNG). For high-assurance applications, the chip can also work with a fingerprint reader, though it is unclear which interface it uses to communicate with such a device.

The Sabrent USB 3.2 Type-C M.2 SSD Enclosure is now available at Amazon for one of its lowest prices to date, according to price tracker CamelCamelCamel. This handy little gadget fits spare M.2 SSDs and allows them to operate as a plug-and-play device. It has a recommended price of $39, but it recently snuck down to just $22.

If the enclosure looks appealing, but you're not sure what SSD to put inside, refine your specific needs regarding metrics like capacity and speed, then check out our list of the best SSDs to see which ones we personally recommend. Alternatively, this enclosure might be a good choice for that spare M.2 SSD you have in a drawer.

Over the last couple of years, the vast majority of external SSDs to hit the market have been 10Gbps or 20Gbps USB 3.2 drives, effectively capped at just over 1,000 MB/s or 2,000 MB/s respectively. But here in 2025, that cap has been blown off, as we’ve recently tested LaCie’s first Thunderbolt 5 drive (rated at 6,700 MB/s reads), as well as Corsair’s EX400U, a USB4 drive that’s rated to 4,000 MB/s read and 3,600 MB/s write.

As both a reviewer and a user of these drives, I find it refreshing to see new levels of speed and innovation. And as an owner of a Samsung S25 Ultra, it’s also nice to see that Corsair’s drive includes a magnetic ring for snapping it on the back of a MagSafe- or Qi2-compatible phone for easy direct-to-drive video recording or transferring large amounts of files.

The Corsair EX400U blows away the USB 3-based competition, as we’d expect. But on our Windows 11-based testbed it also mostly outperforms the LaCie drive running via Thunderbolt 4. Sure, the LaCie drive is much faster over Thunderbolt 5, but there are barely any Thunderbolt 5-based Windows systems at this point, and not a lot of Macs with that interface either. Even the brand-new MacBook Air only ships with Thunderbolt 4.

So for now at least, USB4 seems to be the sweet spot for external storage, and Corsair’s EX400U delivers great USB4 performance in a compact, magnetic-backed package that’s also much less expensive than LaCie’s TB5 drive. It’s got a good shot of landing on our Best External SSD page, but first let’s take a look at the drive’s specs, from Corsair.

Corsair EX400U Specifications

Compatibility complications

Design and accessories

Corsair’s EX400U is a fairly compact (2.53 x 2.52 x 0.47 inches) silver square with a silver metal top and plastic sides. The company did a good job matching the color and texture of the mixed materials that it used here, but there’s no denying the abundance of seams around the top and sides.

The drive feels solid, with no discernable flex, but there’s no denying that something like SK hynix Beetle X31 looks and feels more premium.

The real stand-out exterior feature of the EX400U is the built-in magnetic ring on its base, designed to let the drive snap onto the back of MagSafe-equipped iPhones and Qi2 Android devices. We’ve seen similar form factors before Lexar, MSI, and others. And I’m sure we’ll see more since roomy, speedy and convenient external storage is great for content creators who are always recording video. But Corsair’s EX400U is the first USB4 drive we’ve seen in this form factor. It certainly won’t be the last.

The only physical accessory included in the box is a 30 cm (nearly 12 inches) USB 4 Type-C to Type-C cable. The length is fairly standard, but it’s also both long for connecting to a smartphone and short for desktops, where the USB4 ports live at the back of the case. At least the magnet on the drive means you can stick the drive on any steel elements of the case so it isn’t dangling while you transfer files.

Comparison products

At 2.53 x 2.52 x 0.47 inches, the EX400U isn’t particularly small or large for an external SSD, though it’s much smaller than its primary competition in our test group, the LaCie Rugged SSD Pro5 (0.67 x 2.56 x 3.85 inches). When I magnetically attached the Corsair drive on my S25 Ultra phone, one corner did encroach onto the camera bump, but the edge of the drive wasn’t visible at all as I cycled through the various sensors.

In terms of performance, the only drive that can hope to be competitive in our test pool is LaCie’s Rugged SSD Pro5. And that drive is definitely faster if you’re plugged into a Thunderbolt 5-equipped host. But limited to Thunderbolt 4 / USB4 on our newly built external storage testbed, the LaCie drive didn’t perform as well as I expected.

Storage testbed update

Just before testing both the Corsair drive and the LaCie Pro5, we updated our external storage testbed to an AMD Ryzen 7600X-based PC with an Asus ROG Crosshair X870E Hero motherboard. This was done in part because we needed a system with native USB4 support for upcoming drives.

All the drives in the charts below have been freshly re-tested on the new X870E system, with the exception of the final Iometer sustained sequential test, which is less about top speed and more about how long a drive can write before depleting any fast cache. Although both the LaCie and Corsair drives had their Iometer testing done on the updated testbed. We also updated to CrystalDiskMark 8, rather than the older (and non-comparable) version 7 we used on the previous testbed.

Trace Testing - PCMark 10 Storage Benchmark

PCMark 10 is a trace-based benchmark that uses a wide-ranging set of real-world traces from popular applications and everyday tasks to measure the performance of storage devices.

In this first test, the Corsair EX400U landed a distant second to the pricier LaCie Thunderbolt 5 drive, but it was still far faster than any other external drive we’ve tested. Remember, though, that the LaCie drive was limited by the Thunderbolt 4 bandwidth of our testbed. On a Mac (or presumably on one of the few TB5-equipped PCs), the LaCie is significantly faster than the Corsair EX400U, but it also costs much more.

Transfer Rates – DiskBench

In this real-world file transfer, the Corsair drive looks much better against the LaCie. Granted, it’s a couple hundred MB/s slower on reads, but on writes the Corsair drive is more than twice as fast, and far faster than any other external drive we’ve tested to date.

Synthetic Testing CrystalDiskMark

CrystalDiskMark (CDM) is a free and easy-to-run storage benchmarking tool that SSD companies commonly use to assign product performance specifications. It gives us insight into how each device handles different file sizes. We run this test at its default settings.

In this best-case synthetic sequential scenario on our USB5 / Thunderbolt 4 testbed, the Corsair drive arguably looks its best. It edges out the bottlenecked LaCie drive on reads and blows past it on writes by nearly 700 MB/s. And unsurprisingly, the other 10Gbps or 20Gbps drives are much slower.

Small file performance is also similarly impressive for the Corsair drive, putting it on top again, while the LaCie struggled here, landing in third place behind the Adata SE920.

Sustained Write Performance

A drive's rated write specifications are only a piece of the performance picture. Most external SSDs (just like their internal counterparts) implement a write cache, or a fast area of flash, programmed to perform like faster SLC, that absorbs incoming data.

Sustained write speeds often suffer tremendously when the workload saturates the cache and slips into the "native" TLC or QLC flash. We use Iometer to hammer the SSD with sequential writes for 15 minutes to measure the size of the write cache and performance after the cache is saturated.

The Corsair EX400U drive lacks the LaCie’s initial write speed cache north of 3,000 MB/s, but maintains a faster write speed for the duration of the test than the LaCie, typically between 1,600 and 1,700 MB/s, while the LaCie hovered around 1,600 MB/s after its cache was depleted. So while the LaCie drive is much faster for tasks around 50 GB or less, if your write workloads typically involve much larger amounts of data with no downtime for the drive’s cache to recover, the Corsair EX400U might be the better option. The top of Corsair’s drive did get hot during this test, though, while the LaCie was only mildly warm.

Bottom Line

For creators who need the fastest speed possible and who live solely within the Mac ecosystem using Thunderbolt 5-equipped machines, the LaCie Pro5 is faster and easy to recommend (even though it costs more than the Corsair). But that drive’s mixed performance in Windows under Thunderbolt 4 makes it tough to recommend in mixed computing environments, where USB4 is a much more popular option. There are certainly many more USB4-equipped computers available now and launching soon than there are Thunderbolt 5 systems.

And in the USB4 realm, Corsair’s EX400U strikes a good balance between performance and price. It’s certainly not cheap at $189 for the 2TB model we tested, or $349 for the 4TB model. But both are downright affordable compared to the LaCie drive, which was selling for $329 for the 2TB model and $529 for the 4TB model when we wrote this.

The Corsair drive also ships in a 1TB flavor, which the LaCie drive lacks, for around $119. Given Corsair’s drive is much faster and more future-proof than top 20Gbps drives like the Crucial X10 Pro, it makes those older drives hard to argue for, since they still often sell for between $100 and $115 at the 1TB level or $179 for 2TB. For now at least, the Corsair EX400U is one of the best external drives you can buy, with a great price-to-performance ratio and a still-unique magnetic attachment ring, which can be handy on phones and desktop PCs.

Being on the cutting edge of consumer tech is often painful. Sure, you get the best features or the fastest speed, but often with limited support or hobbled performance in other areas or on other devices. That’s LaCie’s Rugged SSD Pro5 in a nutshell. It’s the fastest external storage drive we’ve ever tested, delivering sequential read speeds close to 7,000 MB/s and reads around 5,200 MB/s – when tested on an M4 Pro-based Apple Mac Mini.

But as of this writing, seemingly the only Windows-based machine available with a Thunderbolt 5 port is Razer’s current-gen Blade 18. In testing on our new Ryzen 9000-based storage testbed with Thunderbolt 4 (via USB4), the Rugged SSD Pro5 couldn’t quite hit 4,000 MB/s reads and managed just over 3,000 MB/s writes. Plus, this LaCie drive has some pretty specific requirements, and isn’t supported at all over Thunderblot 3.

So in short, if your workflow relies solely on a current-gen Mac with Thunderbolt 5 ports and you need maximum speed for video production, the LaCie Rugged SSD Pro 5 is a great external storage option. It’s faster than any other single drive on that platform that we know of. And at $599 for the 4TB model we tested ($399 for the 2TB model), it’s priced squarely at the content creation class who need the speed this drive can provide – again, specifically over TB5.

But for Windows or mixed-platform users, USB4-based drives are available that can perform faster on more hardware and cost less, without the complex compatibility issues of this LaCie Thunderbolt 5 drive.

LaCie Rugged SSD Pro5 Specifications

LaCie Rugged SSD Pro5 compatibility complications

Whether your workflow exists solely within the Mac ecosystem or your devices cross over to Windows and Android devices, there is quite a bit to consider on the compatibility side with the Rugged SSD Pro5. For starters, the drive doesn’t support Thunderbolt 3 ports at all in Windows, and Windows 11 23H2 or higher is a requirement for PCs. You may need to install a LaCie Toolkit to get the drive to work via native Thunderbolt 4 ports (and even then it may be stuck at 10 Gbps). And any system with a 10Gbps or 20Gbps USB port will also need to deliver at least 15W PD to that port for the drive to work.

So much for plug-and-play. We connected this drive to a number of machines during testing, and outside of the recent Mac Mini, the experience was best described as plug-and-pray. For a full list of compatibility considerations, you can check this page at LaCie. To be fair, USB has plenty of its own issues, but we can’t remember a time in recent memory when a storage drive had such complex performance considerations that it warranted its own URL. And you should visit that URL, because there are further stipulations about iPad support and MacOS version requirements that I didn’t get into here.

Design and accessories

The familiar Neil Poulton design of the LaCie Rugged SSD Pro5 is in place here, although the company has chosen blue over the traditional orange. For LaCie die-hards with several drives, that will at least help the Thunderbolt 5 model stand out. And at 0.33 pounds with no discernable flex anywhere, the drive feels like a rubber-clad rock.

It’s also IP69 rated for dust and water protection, although there’s no rubber flap to protect the port when the cable isn’t plugged in. Still, while the drive feels like you could drop it out of a speeding car without major concern for its functionality, creators may put more stock in the fact that the drive comes with a 5-year warranty that includes the Seagate-owned Rescue Data Recovery. I’d still recommend regular cloud backup, though. As with most external SSDs, you’re much more likely under typical circumstances to physically lose the drive than you are to experience internal failure on the drive itself.

The only hardware accessory in the box with the drive is the Thunderbolt 5 cable, which is just over a foot long from connector to connector. This is fine for many situations, although for those who might only have a TB5 port at the back of their system, a 1.5-foot cable feels like it would have been a better choice – especially given the high price of the drive.

Comparison products

As the first Thunderbolt 5 drive we’ve tested (and one of the first TB5 drivers ever, alongside OWC’s Envoy Ultra ) the Rugged SSD Pro 5 is somewhat in a class by itself, at least in our testing pool. Its rated speeds far exceed the many USB 3.2 Gen2 2x2 drives we tested last year (which tended to top out at around 2,000 MB/s). But it just so happens that alongside the LaCie, we also received the Corsair EX400U USB4 drive. It’s “only” rated to 4,000 MB/s, but it’s also much smaller than the LaCie drive and, more importantly, costs a lot less.

To be fair, Corsair listed its drive as sold out when I wrote this, but the same was true of the LaCie drive. Our launch coverage of the Corsair drive had the 2TB model priced at $199 and the 4TB model at $359. That’s quite a bit less than the $399 2TB and $599 4TB MSRP of the LaCie drive. And as we’ll see in testing below, the LaCie drive really only excels when connected to a Thunderbolt 5 port.

Storage testbed update

Just before this review, we updated our external storage testbed to an AMD Ryzen 7600X-based machine with an Asus ROG Crosshair X870E Hero motherboard. This was done in part because we needed a system with native USB4 support for upcoming drives. But in fairness to LaCie, when we plugged the Rugged SSD Pro5 into our old testbed, which had Thunderbolt 4 ports via an ASRock motherboard, the LaCie drive wasn’t recognized at all. LaCie does offer a toolkit for that case, but says the drive will be stuck at 10 GBps in that scenario, so we just switched over to the new testbed.

All the drives in the charts below have been freshly re-tested on the new X870E system, with the exception of the final Iometer sustained sequential test, which is less about top speed and more about how long a drive can write before depleting any fast cache. We also updated CrystalDiskMark 8, rather than the older (and non-comparable) version 7 we were using on the previous testbed.

Trace Testing - PCMark 10 Storage Benchmark

PCMark 10 is a trace-based benchmark that uses a wide-ranging set of real-world traces from popular applications and everyday tasks to measure the performance of storage devices.

We’re used to seeing in the 1,000-1,200 range on this test, even for most 20Gbps drives. LaCie’s Rugged SSD Pro more than doubles that. And at 2,586, it’s also nearly 50% ahead of Corsair’s EX400U USB4 drive on this test. That’s a fantastic start.

Transfer Rates – DiskBench

We use the DiskBench storage benchmarking tool to test real-world file transfer performance with a custom 50GB dataset. We copy 4,617 files (images, videos, and software ISO files) to a folder on the test drive (write). Then, after leaving the system idle for five minutes, we run the same test in reverse, moving the test folder to a different location on our PCIe 4.0 testing drive.

The Rugged SSD Pro also excels in our real-world 50GB read test, at over 200 MB/s faster than the competing Corsair drive. But the Corsair drive flips the script when it comes to write speeds, with its 1,671 MB/s easily doubling the 726 MB/s showing of the LaCie drive over our Thunderbolt 4-equipped USB4 port in Windows 11.

As we’ll see shortly, we know the LaCie drive is capable of much faster speeds over Thunderbolt 5. And the bandwidth is there on our testbed for it to compete or outpace the Corsair drive. We’re not entirely sure whether native USB4 support is just better optimized than Thunderbolt on AMD’s X870E platform (which wouldn’t particularly be a surprise), or if the LaCie drive just doesn’t perform as well as you’d think over Thunderbolt 4, given its higher-bandwidth Thunderbolt 5 abilities.

Synthetic Testing CrystalDiskMark

CrystalDiskMark (CDM) is a free and easy-to-run storage benchmarking tool that SSD companies commonly use to assign product performance specifications. It gives us insight into how each device handles different file sizes. We run this test at its default settings.

Again, the Corsair USB4 drive outpaces the LaCie drive under Windows, when limited to Thunderbolt 4, particularly on writes.

To get a sense of what the Rugged SSD Pro5 can do on a Mac with Thunderbolt 5 ports, we also tested the drive on the M4 Pro-based Mac Mini. Using AmorphousDiskMark on the Mac (CrystalDiskMark doesn’t run on Macs), we recorded sequential read speeds of 6,941.17 MB/s, and write speeds of 5,199.14 MB/s. That’s easily faster than the Corsair drive.

We also ran the Blackmagic Disk Speed Test on the M4 Mac Mini with the LaCie drive. There, the native Thunderbolt 5 performance delivered a read speed of 5,056 MB/s read speed and 4,020.2 MB/s writes. Clearly, LaCie’s drive is faster than any other external drive we’ve tested – but under Windows 11 in our storage testbed, it doesn’t perform as well as we’d expect, even accounting for that system’s Thunderbolt 4 limitations.

The LaCie drive delivers perhaps its worst showing in this test, where its write results in particular are a fraction of what we saw on the Corsair USB4 drive. The LaCie Thunderbolt 5 drive has issues either with Thunderbolt 4 performance in Windows in general, or with our newly built USB4-equipped testbed more specifically.

When plugged into my AMD-based ZenBook 14 laptop’s USB4 port, the LaCie drive failed to mount at all, much like on our older Intel-based testbed with Thunderbolt 4. So while your mileage may vary, it’s hard to recommend this drive for those whose workflows include Windows PCs.

Sustained Write Performance

A drive's rated write specifications are only a piece of the performance picture. Most external SSDs (just like their internal counterparts) implement a write cache, or a fast area of flash, programmed to perform like faster SLC, that absorbs incoming data.

Sustained write speeds often suffer tremendously when the workload saturates the cache and slips into the "native" TLC or QLC flash. We use Iometer to hammer the SSD with sequential writes for 15 minutes to measure the size of the write cache and performance after the cache is saturated.

The bad news is that the Rugged SSD Pro5 only manages to write at its top speed Windows-based speed of around 3,200-3,300MB/s for about 15 seconds, which makes sense given the drive’s stated 50GB cache. Typically, we’d call out a drive with “pro” in its name sporting such a quickly depleted cache – 50GB is a fairly large amount, but it runs out fast at these speeds. But note that once the cache is consumed, the drive still maintains an average write speed above 1,500MB/s for the full 15 minutes of our test (actually the full 30 minutes that we typically run this test – we only chart half of it), which is better than nearly all other drives here.

That said, the Corsair USB4 drive, while it lacks the initial write speed north of 3,000MB/s, maintains a faster write speed than the LaCie for the duration of the test, typically between 1,600 and 1,700 MB/s. So while the LaCie drive indeed delivers class-leading sustained write performance, that advantage really only applies until you’ve written 50 GB. If your write workloads typically involve much larger amounts of data with no downtime for the drive’s cache to recover, the Corsair EX4000U might be the better option. Corsair’s drive did get hot during this test, though, while the LaCie was only mildly warm.

And keep in mind that our primary tests were run in Windows 11 over a USB4 / Thunderbolt 4 port. You may get better results if the only device you use is a TB5-equipped Mac or PC.

Bottom line

The LaCie Rugged SSD Pro 5 combines a tried-and-true rugged design with the fastest speeds we’ve ever seen on an external SSD – when tested on a Thunderbolt 5-equipped Mac. It also ships with a five-year warranty that includes its parent company’s data recovery service. That’s enough to make this drive easy to recommend for Mac users – particularly those who only or primarily use current-gen Mac hardware and need the fastest possible performance for media creation or other write-heavy purposes.

For everyone else though – including Mac owners who still use older hardware, or those who also need to move data around on Windows-based machines, Corsair’s EX4000U delivers fewer compatibility complications and generally faster speed in Windows. It also costs less – that’s assuming you can find either of these drives in stock.

MORE: Best SSDs

MORE: Best External SSDs

MORE: Best SSD for the Steam Deck

Storage mainstay Seagate has been churning out hard drives and SSDs for decades, as well as innumerable portable hard drives. But it’s largely left portable SSDs to its premium, Apple-focused LaCie brand. But today the company is announcing its Ultra-Compact SSD, an external solid-state drive available in 1TB and 2TB capacities that, with its slender design and built-in USB-C port, looks like a high-end flash drive, rather than a traditional portable SSD.

These kinds of drives, sometimes called SSD sticks, that pack SSD-like performance and a built-in USB port for cable-free use, have become increasingly common in the last couple of years, with the SK Hynix Tube T31 being our current favorite of what we’re still classifying as the best flash drives.

We’ll have to do some testing to find out if Seagate’s drive deserves a spot on the above list, but its pretty external shell aside, it has some interesting things going for it that may make it worth considering even if it isn’t the fastest performer. Like many other Seagate products, the Ultra-Compact SSD ships with three years of the company’s Rescue Data Recovery service, as well as six-month trials of cloud backup and image organization services. That’s not going to be important for everyone, but the data recovery service will certainly appeal many who’ve lost irreplaceable data to a drive crash in the past.

Dropbox Backup and Mylio Photos+ image organization and backup services.

Seagate-Ultra Compact SSD specs

Design of the Seagate-Ultra Compact SSD

With a single-piece aluminum silver shell (with plastic plugs on the font and back) and a 2.7 x 0.7 x 0.34 inches, Seagate’s drive looks and feels great. The cap over the USB-C port is all rubber, but it stays on much better than most plastic flash drive caps. And if you’re worried about scratching up the metal, the company also includes a gray rubber sleeve that matches the cap. That does add a little bulk to the drive, but it’s still small enough that it shouldn’t interfere with nearby ports like many competing high-end stick SSDs or flash drives.

Seagate points out that the drive is made up of at least 35% recycled materials (likely the aluminum), and it’s rated for drops up to 3 meters and sports IP54 dust and water resistance. Those specs are likely only while using the sleeve, but the drive feels plenty rugged without it for travel in typical conditions.

Software and included extras

The Seagate Ultra-Compact SSD ships with Seagate’s Rescue Data Recovery service for three years, which families or users dealing with truly irreplaceable data will no doubt find appealing. That said, my personal history with drives like this tells me it’s far more likely that you’d lose a drive this than have it randomly fail and lock you out of data access. If you’re worried about losing things like family photos, a cloud backup of what’s on the drive might be more useful.

Speaking of that, the drive also ships with a six-month trial of Dropbox Backup and the Mylio Photos+ image organization and backup service. I don’t expect these are going to sway many potential buyers, but at least the trials aren’t the more typical 90-day variety. Six months will likely give you enough time to decide whether or not a service is worth paying for.

Comparison products

As a 2TB device in a flash drive form factor, the Seagate Ultra-Compact SSD doesn’t have a ton of direct competition, as many competing drives like the SK Hynix Tube T31 and Kingston DataTraveler Max) both top out at 1TB. The Transcend ESD310 does go up to 2TB though, and is selling for the same $179 price as the MSRP of the 2TB Seagate drive. And while it’s significantly wider, the ADATA SC750 is also available at 2TB for as little as $119. You’ll find all of these drives and more in our benchmark charts below.

Trace Testing - PCMark 10 Storage Benchmark

PCMark 10 is a trace-based benchmark that uses a wide-ranging set of real-world traces from popular applications and everyday tasks to measure the performance of storage devices.

Landing more or less in the middle of our competing cable-free flash drive and SSD comparisons, this isn’t a great showing for Seagate’s drive. But the drive is still much closer to the best drives here than the worst.

Transfer Rates – DiskBench

We use the DiskBench storage benchmarking tool to test file transfer performance with a custom 10GB dataset. We copy 1,204 files (images, videos, and software ISO files) to a folder on the test drive (write). Then, after leaving the system idle for five minutes, we run the same test in reverse, moving the test folder to a different location on our PCIe 4.0 testing drive.

Again the Seagate drive fails to impress here, at least on read speeds. But its write speed of nearly 512 MB/s puts it in 4th place among the other drives tested here. And 570 MB/s mixed-file reads is still is still a solid showing for a drive this small.

Synthetic Testing CrystalDiskMark

CrystalDiskMark (CDM) is a free and easy-to-run storage benchmarking tool that SSD companies commonly use to assign performance specifications to their products. It gives us insight into how each device handles different file sizes. We run this test at its default settings.

While again not the fastest of the bunch, Seagate’s Ultra-Compact SSD manages a balanced read and write speed both easily above 1,000 MB/s (so above its rated speed) in this test. Only our favorite SK Hynix Tube T31 is markedly better on both fronts. But remember, its capacity tops out at 1TB.

On the flip side, there’s little positive to say about the Seagate drive’s small file write results here, other than they aren’t dramatically worse than the worst competing drives in our testing pool. If you’re looking for an external drive to directly run an operating system or demanding programs off of, there are lots of better options.

Bottom line

There’s lots to like about the design as well as the bundled data recovery features of Seagate’s Ultra-Compact SSD. And its performance, while far from class-leading, is still good enough to please mainstream consumers – especially those stepping up from a portable hard drive or an old space-cramped flash drive for backing up key files.

But apart from its compact size and spacious 2TB option, there’s little to set it apart from the pack unless you count its bottom-rung small file performance – which to be fair won’t matter much to those just looking to move files on and off the drive for backup or other sneakernet purposes. And when you consider Adata’s SC750 was faster on nearly all of our tests for $60 less, Seagate’s compact metal shell and three years of data recovery service need to do a lot of heavy lifting to make Seagate’s drive appealing.

Still, with a decent price drop over its initial MSRP, it could be worth considering. It has the nicest design of any of these stick SSDs I’ve used yet, and its performance is still good enough for my typical tasks, like moving test result files and game files between PCs.

MORE: Best SSDs

MORE: Best External SSDs

MORE: Best SSD for the Steam Deck

If you find yourself needing some extra storage for your games, or for moving data between devices outside of a network connection, then having a portable storage solution is a nice thing to have. Smaller is better for portability, but it doesn't also have to equal less capacity. Today's deal is on a 2TB external SSD that you can connect via USB C to all manner of devices, from your games console to your mobile phone, to the usual laptops and desktop PC, or even your camera's.

Head to Amazon for today's deal and pick up the portable Crucial X9 Pro (2TB) external SSD for just $119. It's not the lowest price ever -- that was $87 back in 2023 -- but, you aren't going to see prices like that again for storage unfortunately, especially outside of the larger sales events like Prime Day or Black Friday. The MSRP list price of this drive is $179 with the Camelizer Amazon price checker showing prices steadily fluctuating between $119 and $155.

The X9 Pro measures around 2.5" and comes in a solid and rugged plastic chassis that's rated for IP55 dust and water resistance, It also advertises a resistance to drops from heights no greater than 7.5 feet, which should more than cover the average use-case scenario. Inside the chassis is a small SSD with speedy read and write speed transfer rates up to 1050MB/s over USB 3.2. The X9Pro uses a Type-C USB connection and cable.

I have one of these handy drives and use it to record video from my phone. Large 4K video files quickly soak up my phone's valuable storage so offloading it to the X9 Pro keeps my mobile speedy and makes it easier and faster to connect to my PC for video editing. The small size means I can just keep it in my pocket while I'm out and about, and always have it to hand when I need it.

Don't forget to look at our Amazon coupon codes for January 2025 and see if you can save on today's deal or other products at Amazon.

Corsair has introduced an external SSD aimed at power users and content creators, sporting high transfer speeds and compatibility with the latest connectivity standards. The EX400U operates up to 4,000 MB/s and features USB4/Thunderbolt 4 support with 1TB, 2TB, and 4TB capacity options. Pricing starts at $139.99.

Corsair's new EX400U SSD operates at a maximum sequential write speed of 4,000 MB/s and a sequential write speed of 3,500 MB/s for the 1TB variant. The 2TB and 4TB options get a 100 MB/s upgrade in write speed (3,600 MB/s). The only caveat is that users must use the EX400U with a USB4 or Thunderbolt 4-supported device to get the maximum rated transfer speeds.

The drive is enclosed in a square 2.5-inch (64mm) gunmetal clamshell that protects it and serves as a heatsink to keep it cool. It is rated for operating temperatures between 0 and 70 degrees Celsius and is designed to absorb up to 1,500 Gs of shock, keeping user data safe even under harsh conditions.

A USB Type-C port powers the drive, featuring up to 40 Gbps bandwidth courtesy of USB4. Thunderbolt 4 has integrated USB4 compatibility, making the drive compatible with Thunderbolt 4.

Corsair has also made the EX400U compatible with iPhones, starting with the iPhone 15 and up. The integrated MagSafe connector lets iPhone users strap the EX400U directly to their compatible iPhone. It gives them a convenient and cordless method of attaching the external SSD to their phone while using the drive.

At speeds of up to 4,000 MB/s, the EX400U's performance is on par with that of the best PCIe 3.0-based SSDs. Although PCIe 3.0 speeds may seem underwhelming, 4,000 MB/s is incredibly fast for external SSDs. Some of the best external SSDs often have speeds ranging from just 120 MBps to just under 3,000 MB/s.

With that speed comes an equally hefty price tag. Corsair charges similar prices for the EX400U as equivalent PCIe 4.0 internal SSDs. The 1TB variant costs $139.99, the 2TB model is $199.99, and the 4TB model costs $359.99.

Lenovo has revealed that it has designed a hand grenade-inspired external SSD. The design pays tribute to the recently released China blockbuster war movie Operation Dragon, also known as Operation Leviathan or Operation Hadal in some territories. Frequent fliers will probably want to avoid weapons-styled computer accessories and electronics like this, to prevent any unnecessary delays when passing through security.

A machine translation of the blurb in the above image reads: "Lenovo Crowdfunding - Savior Tactical Mobile SSD. Officially authorized hardcore aluminum alloy grenade shape. USB 3.2 high-speed protocol. Compatible with multiple specifications of SSD." There follows the logos for Lenovo Legion and Operation Hadal.

The top-linked official Lenovo crowdfunder page also indicates that the new grenade SSD is primed for crowdfunding success. Lenovo's project is 69% funded with several days left, and quite a few reports in Chinese language tech media today highlight this absurd product. It is therefore likely to be an explosive success (ba dum tss).

We don't have the specs for this Y599 (approx. $82) crowdfunded product except the few mentioned above. However, the grenade-styled external SSD is expected to feature 1TB of storage, perform data transfers at up to 1,050MB/s, and feature a USB Type-C interface. These specs are based on the assumption that the tactical SSD uses an existing Lenovo Legion (AKA Savior in China) portable SSD as its foundation.

A short history of weaponry styled PC components

Lenovo's war movie-inspired SSD isn't the first ill-advised design choice we have seen foisted upon the PCs and electronics market. Gigabyte has previously been guilty of producing motherboards with heatsinks that have been known to trigger airport scanners.

Perhaps Gigabyte's best-known airport security check impediment was the G1 Assassin 2 motherboard. This Intel X79 chipset board featured a "redesigned distinctive signature heatpipe design… that it is as deadly to heat as it looks." It looks like a pistol, and it even has a skull biting a bowie knife on the grip. New Zealand airport security ruined one of these motherboards with their investigations in 2015.

Gigabyte would release an almost as audacious design with its Gaming G1 Sniper socket LGA 1366 motherboard. This featured a banana-mag heatsink design with a 'bullet' protruding from one end.

MSI also has a penchant for military-themed motherboards, but its Bazooka, Mortar, and the like have always avoided weapons-shaped heatsinks.

Still, a portable SSD is probably more likely to be carried by someone onto a plane, so Lenovo's 'Tactical SSD' maybe even a worse idea than Gigabyte's Assassin and Sniper products.

Seagate has expanded its LaCie Rugged series with the Rugged SSD Pro5, a portable SSD featuring Thunderbolt 5 connectivity for high-speed data transfer and enhanced compatibility. As per our headline, this new device is claimed to be able to transfer data at up to 6,700 MB/s. The SSD Pro5, announced at CES 2025, is designed to meet the storage demands of professionals working with large data files, such as raw images, video, and high-resolution audio.

There are not a lot of external SSDs offering support for Thunderbolt speeds. For example, the Samsung X5 that we tested, supports Thunderbolt 3 and offers sequential read and write speeds of up to 2,800 MB/s and 2,300 MB/s respectively. Or if you want something faster, the OWC Express 1M2 is another Thunderbolt/USB 4.0 external SSD (with a removable M.2 drive) that can go beyond 3,000 MB/s. However, neither of the devices comes even close to the performance that Seagate is claiming for the new LaCie Rugged device.

The Rugged SSD Pro5 offers read speeds of up to 6,700 MB/s and write speeds of up to 5,300 MB/s. This makes it the fastest external SSD on the market, provided you are connected to a Thunderbolt 5 compatible device. The SSD is said to feature a 50GB cache, and once that is consumed, performance drops to 5,000 MB/s read 1,800 MB/s write.

Essentially the drive is suitable for demanding workflows such as 8K video editing, large-sized media transfers, and large-scale data backups. The drive offers backward compatibility for devices using Thunderbolt 4 and USB 10/20/40Gbps USB-C hosts on Windows, macOS, and iPad Pro, offering a minimum 15W of power.

Durability remains a cornerstone of the LaCie Rugged series. The SSD Pro5 features an IP68-rated design that protects against water, dust, shocks, and drops of up to three meters. The drive is reinforced with a rugged rubber enclosure and is built with 45% recycled materials, for those who care about the environment.

Seagate will initially offer storage capacities of 2TB and 4TB, catering to diverse needs, from casual fieldwork to extensive professional projects. As with most of its products, the Rugged SSD Pro5 will come with Seagate’s Rescue Data Recovery Services in case of accidental data loss, alongside a limited five-year warranty. Pricing starts at $399.99 (2TB) and $599.99 (4TB) with global availability starting later this month.

The SK hynix Beetle X31 first crawled onto the external SSD stage in mid-2023, sporting a gold-clad aluminum chassis, a 10 Gbps interface, and a top capacity of 1TB. Now the company is updating its lineup with the 2TB Beetle X31 we're looking at here. The more spacious scarab drive sports a silver carapace this time, but aside from the color shift and a doubling of capacity, not much has changed – which certainly isn't a bad thing.

The company includes a generous accessory package, with both USB-C and USB-A cables and a silicon bumper that feels like it's more useful for keeping the drive's surface scuff free than for actual protection. The drive's aluminum shell feels as solid as any external SSD I've tested, save perhaps LaCie's pricey Rugged Mini SSD.

That said, the biggest hurdle the 2TB Beetle might face is pricing. With an MSRP of $169, the drive faces stiff competition from other great 10 Gbps drives like Crucial's X9 Pro and the Silicon Power PX10,both of which currently sell for less at the same capacity. But I'd expect the Beetle's price to settle competitively into the market, just as the company's Tube T31 stick drive has, with frequent sales making it hard to ignore.

Specifications

Design and Accessories for the SK hynix Beetle X31

At 2.91 x 1.81 x 0.58 inches with a smooth silver metal shell, the X31 feels more like a futuristic pebble than a six-legged insect. It arguably feels better in the hand than any portable drive I've tested – for whatever that's worth. It's also pretty pocket friendly, though competing drives from Crucial and Silicon power are slimmer.

One area where the Beetle X31 really stands out is in its included accessories. The company includes a pair of white 10-inch USB cables, one ending in USB-C and the other in USB-A (either connects to the drive at the other end via USB-C). Also in the box is what the company calls a protective case. Really though, it's a clear TPU bumper that runs around the drive, protecting its edges. It's a nice add-in, but it doesn't feel particularly necessary, as the drive's enclosure is an extremely solid-feeling chunk of aluminum that looks and feels very premium.

Some may prefer the champagne gold of the lower-capacity models, but I prefer the silver (hynix calls it dark gray) of the 2TB model as it's more neutral, and I have a feeling many Macbook owners will also find this color appealing.

The drive also has silicon bumpers on the bottom that both hide the internal access screws and keep the SSD from slipping around on your desk. Overall, I like the design a lot, though Crucial's X9 and X10 drive feel similarly solid and are thinner.
The drive ships free of any kind of software or apps, which I think is generally fine since most included storage software is usually freeware or offers little tangible value anyway.

Comparison Products

There are loads of 2TB 10 Gbps external storage options on the market, including some of the best flash drives and the best external SSDs. But the toughest competition for the Beetle X31 will come from a couple of lower-priced 10 Gbps options, namely Crucial's X9 Pro and the Silicon Power PX10. The latter was selling for just $124 in the 2TB capacity when we wrote this review.

Both of those drives are also slimmer than the Beetle X31, though the PX10 is longer (housing a full-size 2280 SSD under its aluminum shell, and Crucial's drive is a little wider. Really though, it's all going to come down to performance.

Trace Testing - PCMark 10 Storage Benchmark

PCMark 10 is a trace-based benchmark that uses a wide-ranging set of real-world traces from popular applications and everyday tasks to measure the performance of storage devices.

The Beetle X31 didn't start off our testing on a high note, with its 1001 score here landing it in the lower half of our comparison drives. But it does manage to beat Samsung's 10 GBps T7 Shield. The Silicon Power PX10 does better here, and costs less.

Transfer Rates – DiskBench

We use the DiskBench storage benchmarking tool to test real-world file transfer performance with a custom 50 GB dataset. We copy 4,617 files (images, videos, and software ISO files) to a folder on the test drive (write). Then, after leaving the system idle for five minutes, we run the same test in reverse, moving the test folder to a different location on our PCIe 4.0 testing drive.

Once again the Beetle X31 fails to land near the top, this time beating only the two Samsung drives. That said, its read speeds aren't that far off the competition, when you disregard the pricier 20 GBps Crucial X10 Pro that's primarily here for context. And its write performance was better in this test, landing in third place among other 10 Gbps drives.

Synthetic Testing CrystalDiskMark

CrystalDiskMark (CDM) is a free and easy-to-run storage benchmarking tool that SSD companies commonly use to assign product performance specifications. It gives us insight into how each device handles different file sizes. We run this test at its default settings.

In this synthetic sequential test, the hynix drive looks its best yet, with similar reads and writes landing it just behind the PX10 in the former and just ahead in the latter.

Looking at IOPS, the Beetle X31 is a mixed bag, besting everything but the PX10 on reads, but only beating the poor-performing T5 Evo on random writes. Still, its write score is at least respectable here. I wouldn't recommend booting your primary OS from the SK hynix drive (or any external SSD, honestly), but for typical storage and light program tasks, these results are more than fine.

Sustained Write Performance

A drive's rated write specifications are only a piece of the performance picture. Most external SSDs (just like their internal counterparts) implement a write cache, or a fast area of flash, programmed to perform like faster SLC, that absorbs incoming data.

Sustained write speeds often suffer tremendously when the workload saturates the cache and slips into the "native" TLC or QLC flash. We use Iometer to hammer the SSD with sequential writes for 15 minutes to measure the size of the write cache and performance after the cache is saturated.

On this last and most demanding test, the SK hynix Beetle X31 performed reasonably well, managing to write at around 1040 MB/s for about seven minutes, but then it fell to a very slow sub-150 MB/s range for the rest of our test. That means if you're writing less than about 430 GB, the SK hynix drive will be faster than most 10 GBps drives. But if you're writing substantially more than that in one continuous run, many drives will be faster.

The T7 Shield and Seagate Game drive managed to stick close to 100 MB/s throughout our test. And the Silicon Power PX 10, while it dropped down from its peak performance after a minute on this test, still managed to stay above 800 MB/s for nearly the entirety of our test, making it much faster than the hynix drive for truly demanding pro-level tasks, like filling the entire drive quickly.

Bottom Line

The SK hynix Beetle X31 doesn't stand above the best 10 Gbps SSDs in speed or price (at least at its $169 MSRP), but its performance is generally quite good, especially if you aren't often doing pro-level tasks like writing to the entire drive all at once from a fast internal drive. For file storage, running basic programs, or plugging into a supported console for game backups, its speed and responsiveness is more than adequate and many wouldn't notice the difference compared to a demonstrably faster alternative.

And despite owning faster and roomier drives, I often found myself using the Beetle X31 for day-to-day storage tasks, because I like the way it looks and feels in my hand, and because the white cables (both USB-A and USB-C) are easy to identify in my small mountain range of cable clutter. As for the $169 launch price, it's high when speedier drives like the Silicon Power X10 cost significantly less. But I'm pretty confident we'll see the Beetle X31 settle in at a more sensible price. After all, the 1TB SK hynix Tube T31 started out at $99, had dropped to $84 by the time I was writing our review, and was recently selling for at $59 during Black Friday.

MORE: Best SSDs

MORE: Best External SSDs

MORE: Best SSD for the Steam Deck

Right now at Amazon, you can find the Crucial X9 2TB portable SSD available for its lowest price so far this year. It usually costs around $148, but today, it's been marked down to $109 as part of an early Black Friday promotion—this puts the price at around 5 cents per GB. Overall this is a pretty good deal for a portable SSD but it's not exactly the fastest on the market. This drive is well-suited for anyone looking for storage on the go with a budget in mind.

We haven't had the opportunity to review the Crucial X9, but we did review the Crucial X10 Pro and really enjoyed our experience. It made its way to our list of best External SSDs as our top recommendation for portable USB 20GBps SSDs. The Crucial X9 has different speeds, supporting only 10 GBps connections.

This discount applies to the 2TB Crucial X9 portable SSD, which also comes in 1TB and 4TB capacities. Under optimal conditions, the read speed can reach up to 1050MBs. It's compatible with USB 3.2 Gen 2 interfaces, which support speeds as high as 10GBps.

Because this is a portable drive, it's designed to withstand a bit of everyday use and can handle temperature variances, it's also vibration-proof and can handle drops of up to 7.5 feet on carpeted floors. The purchase comes with three months of Mylio Photos+, Acronic True Image, and Adobe Acrobat Pro, but you have to register the drive to get access to these, and this offer is only valid through December 31st, 2024.

We are working hard to find the best deals for you this Black Friday. If you're looking for other products, check out our Black Friday Computer Hardware Deals Live blog for a range of products, or dive deeper into our specialized SSD and Storage Deals Live blog, Monitor Deals Live, Graphics Card Deals, or CPU Deals pages.

California-based integrated memory and storage maker Smart Modular Technologies is introducing its T6EN SSDs for aerospace, defense, and industrial purposes. These drives use 3D TLC NAND and are advertised as high-speed, high-capacity, and high-security for U.2 up to 15TB and up to 8TB for E1.S and M.2 2280 interfaces.

The 'ruggedness' claims are made because SMART uses a set of hardware and software implementations. SMART uses a thicker PCB and a higher margin for routing signals within the drive inside a durable enclosure. To add another level of deterrence against specific environments, the T6EN drives have a conformal coating that gives protection against moisture, thermal shock, static, vibration, and contamination, according to SMART's press release.

Moreover, it cherry-picks components with the highest reliability during eight hours of burn-in testing with a variable temperature range. This is needed as this series of SSDs is intended to work under higher operating temperatures and environments from -40 degrees Celsius to +85 degrees Celsius.

The T6EN SSDs use AES-XTS 256-bit encryption and proprietary security features. Mike Guzzo, the senior director of SMART's Rugged range of drives, explains, "Our new T6EN SSDs deliver a rich, ruggedized feature set coupled with our proprietary security algorithms, erase trigger, and hardware write-protection."

Additionally, the T6EN range of storage drives is OPAL 2.0 compliant, a hardware-based security standard for Self-Encrypting Drives. The benefit is that hardware-based encryptions do not hurt the performance of the systems and are far more secure than software-based solutions. There have been times when SSDs with software-based options have been bypassed and were found to have encryption issues.

There are pros and cons for Opal-compliant drives, which would require its buyers to have personnel who can handle significant deployment and management. However, it is also noted that Self-Enabling Drives are not designed for in-flight data protection and, hence, are not part of the certification.

There is always a need to add security to any computation components, especially for mission-critical and industrial uses, with hardware-level certifications and the application of hardware and software-based protection—open-source or proprietary—or both. That said, those who have deployed these drives can attest to their security and reliability features under a specific workload and environment used for a long time.

When I first saw Team Group's PD20 Mini External SSD at Computex earlier this year, I thought its metallic gray and ribbed black rubber look made it one of the more attractive external SSD designs. Now that I have it in hand, I still think it looks quite nice – however much that matters for a storage device that's likely to spend most of its time out of sight. Its top loop does mean you could clip it on your bag to show it off if you wanted to, but that just seems like a good way to eventually lose your precious files.

Because this is a 20Gbps drive, my performance expectations for the PD20 were high, and Team Group's drive is certainly capable of delivering speeds near the top end of that spec. But its performance in our testing was mixed overall, and the PD20 faces stiff competition from the many other 20Gbps drives on the market, some of which cost less and many of which perform better overall. That makes the PD20 a tough sell for a slot on our Best External SSDs list. But if your needs don't veer much toward professional storage tasks and you like the way this drive looks, it's worth considering – especially if you find it on sale.

Team Group PD20 Mini External SSD Specs

Design of the Team Group PD20 Mini External SSD

Personally, I think the Team Group PD20 is a pretty drive. But it doesn't feel as good or rugged as it looks. The gray metal-looking bits are actually plastic, and the shell flexes a bit when squeezed. The USB Type-C port on the bottom can be covered when not in use by a silicone flap that's a continuation of the ribbed black outer section, to help provide the rated IP54 dust and water resistance rating.

The plastic exterior makes for a fairly light drive, at 22 grams. But it's not as if metal-clad drives that weigh about twice as much (like Crucial's X10 Pro) actually feel heavy. Personally, I'd prefer the extra weight for the rigidity and premium feel that comes with a metal shell.

At 75 x 34 x 15.2mm (about 3 x 1.3 x .6 inches), the PD20 is a bit thicker than most modern external SSDs, but otherwise not noticeably larger than most competing drives. That said, its size and thickness make me wonder why Team Group felt compelled to put "Mini" in the drive's name. The only recent portable SSD that's appreciably bigger is, ironically, LaCie's Rugged Mini SSD, which is over 5 inches long and 3.5 inches wide.

There isn't much to say on the software and accessory front. The PD20 ships with a roughly 10-inch USB-C-to-USB-C cable, and the drive arrives formatted in exFAT with no software on the device.

Comparison Products

We've reviewed quite a few 20Gbps portable SSDs in recent months, as companies compete for higher numbers even though the USB 3.2 Gen2 2x2 port barely exists outside of enthusiast motherboards. But at $88 for the 1TB model and $147 for the 2TB model we tested, the PD20 lands in between the least-expensive 20Gbps drive we've tested, Adata's SD810 ($69 for 1TB, $129 for 2TB), and our favorite 20Gbps drive, Crucial's X10 Pro($112 for 1TB, $205 for 2TB). Team Group has also promised a 4TB model, but as of this writing it wasn't yet available for sale in the U.S.

Note that the Crucial drive has often been on sale for much less than its current price. It seems likely that the X10 Pro will drop in price during the upcoming shopping season, but that could be true of any of the drives we've tested below.

Trace Testing - PCMark 10 Storage Benchmark

PCMark 10 is a trace-based benchmark that uses a wide-ranging set of real-world traces from popular applications and everyday tasks to measure the performance of storage devices.

Team Group's PD20 didn't stand out on this first test, especially for a 20Gbps SSD, landing ahead of Samsung's recent drives, but otherwise near the bottom of our tested competitors.

Transfer Rates – DiskBench

We use the DiskBench storage benchmarking tool to test file transfer performance with a custom 50GB dataset. We copy 4,617 files (images, videos, and software ISO files) to a folder on the test drive (write). Then, after leaving the system idle for five minutes, we run the same test in reverse, moving the test folder to a different location on our PCIe 4.0 testing drive.

The PD20 looked a lot better in this real-world file transfer trial. Its read speed of 1287MBps was enough to edge out Crucial's X10 Pro, and its write speed of 753MBps wasn't far behind the Crucial drive either. That said, Adata's cheaper SD810 did a little better on both fronts on this test.

Synthetic Testing CrystalDiskMark

CrystalDiskMark (CDM) is a free and easy-to-run storage benchmarking tool that SSD companies commonly use to assign performance specifications to their products. It gives us insight into how each device handles different file sizes. We run this test at its default settings.

The Team Group drive finds itself at the top of our chart for synthetic sequential reads, and the write performance here was also quite good. This indicates the drive is likely fast for moderate-sized file transfers. But as we'll see shortly, it doesn't perform as well for professional (sustained) workloads or moving massive amounts of data at high speeds.

In small file performance, the PD20 again didn't impress, landing at the bottom for reads and in the lower middle for writes, compared to the competing drives we tested.

Sustained Write Performance

A drive's rated write specifications are only a piece of the performance picture. Most external SSDs (just like their internal counterparts) implement a write cache, or a fast area of flash, programmed to perform like faster SLC, that absorbs incoming data. Sustained write speeds often suffer tremendously when the workload saturates the cache and slips into the "native" TLC or QLC flash. We use Iometer to hammer the SSD with sequential writes for 15 minutes to measure both the size of the write cache and performance after the cache is saturated.

The Team Group PD20 proves on this test that it's not a good option for professional users. It's only able to write at its max speed (a bit under 1800MBps) for about 50 seconds before dropping to the low 700s until about the two-minute mark. Then it drops again, eventually alternating between 400 and a little over 200MBps.

The PD20 arguably performs better on this tough test than Adata's cheaper SD810, which falls off a performance cliff into the mid-200 range after about 75 seconds. But the Crucial X10 Pro proves its worth (and higher price) here, delivering write performance above 1700MBps for more than 11 minutes, then only dropping to around 1400MBps in this test.

Bottom Line

The Team Group PD20 Mini External SSD stands out from competing 20Gbps drives with its looks, though not much else. Its price isn't the cheapest among its 20Gbps peers, and its performance was mixed at best in our benchmarks. If you're after a value-oriented drive in this class, I'd suggest Adata's SD810. And if sustained write speed is key, Crucial's X10 Pro is a much faster drive, though you'll pay more for the ability to fill up your external storage quickly.

MORE: Best SSDs

MORE: Best External SSDs

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According to reports from the Western Digital community forum since October 8, it seems that a significant portion of Western Digital NVMe SSD users are suffering from looping Blue Screens of Death as of the Windows 11 24H2 update, thanks to a misconfigured NVMe Host Memory Buffer.

The models most commonly impacted seem to be WD Blue SN580 and WD Black SN770, which rely on HMB. Host Memory Buffer for NVMe storage drives allows the drives in question to use system RAM as additional cache, usually about 64MB— but 24H2 has been seen allocating as much as 200MB, which seems to cause the instability.

Fortunately, Western Digital NVMe SSD users aren't totally out of luck. A quick Registry edit (Safe Mode advised) to limit HMB allocation to the intended 64MB or turning it off outright has been reported to fix the problem. And, of course, since HMB and related settings are purely for NVMe rather than SATA SSDs, users of Western Digital SATA SSDs have nothing to be concerned about here.

How To Fix NVMe SSD Crashing in Windows 11 24H2

1. Open Start Menu, type Regedit to enter the Registry Editor.
2. Find "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\StorPort key"
3. Create "HmbAllocationPolicy" subkey unless it's already there.
4. Set DWORD to 0 or 2— 0 disables HMB entirely, while 2 sets it to the default 64MB value.

Of course, disabling HMB entirely will have a greater performance deficit than just lowering the allocation to 64MB, but one of the two steps is highly recommended if you're a Western Digital NVMe drive user experiencing this issue since it seems to be the only solution.

Besides a registry edit, users have also had luck reverting the Windows 11 24H2 update entirely to fix this problem. While a quick regedit is probably the cleanest way to solve the problem, reverting to Windows 11 is also an option if you have other issues with the Windows 11 24H2 update, mainly if you apply the fix and find yourself having significantly reduced performance compared to the previous updates.

Finally, it's worth noting that this issue might not be exclusive to Western Digital NVMe drives since HMB is hardly a WD-exclusive feature. This misconfiguration seems to have been done within Windows 11 itself, not by Western Digital. Thus far, reports we've found have all been for Western Digital drives, but if you encounter BSODs with Windows 11 24H2 and use an NVMe drive, applying the fixes suggested above may be the best move.

How much are you willing to pay for external storage that matches the look of your PS5? Seagate hopes the answer is $129.99 for a 1TB SSD and $219.99 for 2TB, which is roughly twice the price of similarly-performing alternatives. The Seagate Game Drive External SSD sports a white and black exterior and Playstation logo that at least partially accounts for the drive's high price. It's also one of the faster 10Gbps drives we've tested in our PC-based benchmarks.

But Sony only allows external storage to be used for running older PS4 games and backing up PS5 titles , so it's unclear how much speed really matters. If you're mostly using this drive for backups and so you don't have to re-download games that you move off of your internal drive, you can just start the process when you're done with a gaming session and walk away until the next time you want to game.

Seagate tries to sweeten the deal with this drive by including a two-week trial of PlayStation Plus Premium, but it doesn't apply to existing members. And I feel like if you're considering buying an external drive to match your PS5, there's a good chance you're already a subscriber. 

Seagate Game Drive External SSD Specs

Design of the Seagate Game Drive External SSD

At 3.78 x 1.97 x 0.43 inches and 69.5 grams, with a black plastic bottom and matte-white top and sides, the Seagate Game Drive External SSD certainly looks like it belongs next to a PS5 (though PS4 support is also listed on the box). There's a PlayStation logo on the top and a blue light bar on the bottom. Part of me wishes the company had gone a step further to emulate the distinctive shape of Sony's console, but Seagate drive's shape is just your typical storage rectangle.

The drive comes with both USB Type-A and USB Type-C cables and a 3-year warranty, as well as the two-week trial of PlayStation Plus Premium.

Comparison Products

Most of the drives we've tested recently sport faster 20Gbps (USB 3.2 Gen2 2x2) interfaces, but the Game Drive External SSD's primary competition on our charts with be the previously mentioned Silicon Power PX10 (currently $125 in the 2TB capacity), and Crucial's X9 Pro ($163 for 2TB as of this writing), both 10Gbps drives. Given the Seagate drive's $220 launch price, it needs to impress when it comes to performance. And in many ways it does.

PlayStation 5 Testing

Our PlayStation 5 testing was fairly limited.

Writing 193GB to the drive via the faster USB-A ports at the back took 16 minutes and 14 seconds (and 10 seconds longer via the USB-C port on the front of the console, likely just down to run-to-run variance), and 26 minutes and 30  seconds to read from the drive to the PS5's internal SSD.

We also did the same task using a Seagate Xbox 5TB hard drive. The same 193GB folder took more than twice as long, 32 minutes and 52 seconds, to write to the external hard drive, and slightly longer – 1,856 seconds – to write the data back to the console's internal storage. In short, as you might expect, it's much faster to write to this external SSD than it is to write to a spinning-platter hard drive. And some of that speed advantage carries over to reading from the drive, onto the PS5's internal storage, but not as much as you might think.

Windows Testing

Trace Testing - PCMark 10 Storage Benchmark

PCMark 10 is a trace-based benchmark that uses a wide-ranging set of real-world traces from popular applications and everyday tasks to measure the performance of storage devices.

On this first test, the Seagate Game drive impressively comes in first place, beating out drives like the Crucial X10 Pro and Adata's SD810, that technically have twice the bandwidth.

Transfer Rates – DiskBench

We use the DiskBench storage benchmarking tool to test file transfer performance with a custom 50GB dataset. We copy 4,617 files (images, videos, and software ISO files) to a folder on the test drive (write). Then, after leaving the system idle for five minutes, we run the same test in reverse, moving the test folder to a different location on our PCIe 4.0 testing drive.

In this real-world performance test, Seagate's drive looks less impressive. Sure, it's not surprising that the plethora of 20Gbps drives at the top of the chart perform much better. But the Game Drive lands just below Silicon Power's much cheaper PX10 10Gbps drive and just above (at least on read speeds) Kingston's DataTraveler Max, which is a flash drive (albeit a fast one).

Synthetic Testing CrystalDiskMark

CrystalDiskMark (CDM) is a free and easy-to-run storage benchmarking tool that SSD companies commonly use to assign performance specifications to their products. It gives us insight into how each device handles different file sizes. We run this test at its default settings.

The synthetic large-file results here are similar to our real-world results above. Segate's drive performs well for a 10Gbps drive, but is slightly slower than the cheaper (and smaller) Silicon Power alternative.

When it comes to random writes/IOPS, something that isn't likely all that important for a backup drive, Seagate's Game Drive lands comfortably in the middle, while the competing Silicon Power drive sits impressively at the top of our chart.

Sustained Write Performance

A drive's rated write specifications are only a piece of the performance picture. Most external SSDs (just like their internal counterparts) implement a write cache, or a fast area of flash, programmed to perform like faster SLC, that absorbs incoming data. Sustained write speeds often suffer tremendously when the workload saturates the cache and slips into the "native" TLC or QLC flash. We use Iometer to hammer the SSD with sequential writes for 15 minutes to measure both the size of the write cache and performance after the cache is saturated.

This is the most grueling of our storage benchmarks, and the one most important for creative professionals who move lots of data. Here, the Seagate Game Drive External SSD delivered write speeds above 1,000 MBps for an impressive 10 minutes, before becoming more erratic, but remaining close to its peak speeds.

This is impressive sustained performance, and better than the Silicon Power drive, which dropped to the mid-800 MBps range after less than a minute. Still, for gaming purposes plugged into a PS5, you wouldn't notice the difference between these two drives. This kind of sustained performance is better suited to professional workloads.

Conclusion

Seagate's Game Drive External SSD is a good performer for a 10Gbps drive, at least in our Windows-based testing where we have comparative data. And it will certainly serve you well for running PS4 titles or backing up PS5 titles or other game files – just as nearly every external SSD would. But its launch price makes Seagate's drive a hard sell unless you're a collector and / or a big PlayStation fan who wants your external storage to match your gaming console.

The Game Drive's street price will likely drop from the MSRP, as we've seen with Samsung's T5 Evo, which was also priced too high at launch. But at $129.99 (1TB) and $219.99 (2TB), Seagate's drive needs to dip 40-50% before it's worth considering for those unwilling to pay a hefty price premium for the PlayStation branding.

MORE: Best SSDs

MORE: Best External SSDs

MORE: How We Test HDDs And SSDs

 Human Things is back with a Kickstarter campaign for multiple handheld gaming companions. The company behind popular products like Genki Audio, Covert Dock Mini, and Covert Dock 2 for the Nintendo Switch has several new items planned, including a 100W TurboCharger, PocketPro old-style wireless gamepad, Saya Carry sling for portable gaming systems, and what we feel is the headlining item: the SavePoint M.2 2230 SSD enclosure. Only a few days remain, but if you're after a portable storage enclosure or one of the other offerings, it's a good time to reserve your spot.

It's worth noting that backing any crowdfunded project comes with some inherent risk, but Human Things has done this several times now — this is its sixth Kickstarter campaign. Also, with over $800,000 pledged, it looks like a reasonable bet that this campaign will be successful as well. Still, don't invest more than you can afford to lose. 

One product of particular interest is the SavePoint, a diminutive SSD enclosure designed for M.2 2230 SSDs. This form factor has become much more popular since the release of the Steam Deck, Steam Deck OLED, and the original Asus ROG Ally, among others. In many cases, the original SSDs in these portable gaming systems have to be upgraded and replaced, and it’s easier to move your files across with an external SSD enclosure. The old drive, or a secondary M.2 2230 SSD, can also tag along in the enclosure for extra space if you’re a pack rat. It’s also convenient to have two drives if you want to run more than one OS.

While SSD enclosures, and even M.2 2230 SSD enclosures, are nothing new, the SavePoint has quite a few tricks up its sleeve. The first is that it passthrough charging. This means you can power the external drive and the host system at the same time, and the latter can be used even while the SavePoint recharges its internal battery. Quite a few handheld docks and hubs have struggled with this usability feature, due to charging standards and different power modes, although firmware has in many cases caught up.

The SavePoint is also optimized for handheld use in a variety of ways. Many DIYers have modified their handhelds to fit external SSDs of all sizes, but the SavePoint is as svelte as possible while being able to fit and cool a range of M.2 2230 SSDs, thanks to its integrated heatsink. The SavePoint is also MagSafe compatible for quick and secure attachment. This makes it feel like a natural companion, as it requires no cutting up or disfiguring your Deck or Ally.

The last feature helps complete this unique package. The SavePoint includes a capacitor for power loss protection, which makes it a safer platform for your data. In the event of a power loss, the SavePoint can provide enough power for the drive to finish up any remaining write operations. This is not the only M.2 2230 SSD enclosure to include this feature — Dockcase also has this available — but along with the other features it makes for a complete solution. There's also the Sharge Disk, but SavePoint emphasizes that its MSRP is lower than both of these alternatives.

As far as technical specs go, the SavePoint transfers at up to 10Gbps over USB 3.2 Gen2x1, with a designed power requirement of 15W. That's plenty of speed and power for sustained transfers, easily surpassing some of the internal storage solutions that the Steam Deck has shipped with (like the 64GB eMMC module).

The case takes an M.2 2230 SSD and cools it via an aluminum case, with the capacitor located next to the SSD slot. It’s unclear what bridge chip the SavePoint is using, but the Realtek RTL9210PD is popular and used with the Dockcase solution. The SavePoint comes with a USB cable, MagSafe Sticker, and hex key for installation.

For the remaining duration of the Kickstarter, which ends on September 9, the SavePoint is available for $39, $11 off from the planned MSRP. The estimated delivery date is for November of this year. The SavePoint comes in an array of colors, so back the one (or more) that suits your taste. Optional add-ons are available during the checkout process. Shipping is global with cost depending on your location.

The line between the best external SSDs and the best flash drives continues to blur. Not long ago, SK hynix impressed us by putting an actual SSD inside of a flash-drive-like housing, making the Tube T31 the fastest "flash drive" we've tested to date. Now Adata has effectively done the same thing with its SC750 drive, which is nearly as fast in our testing as the Tube T31 and about half the size.

The SC750 also sports a retractable USB-C port in place of the SK hynix drive's USB-A port under an easy-to-lose cap. And while we tested the 1TB model of the Adata drive, a 2TB version should be available sometime in September according to a company representative, making Adata's drive more spacious than the SK hynix Tube T31, which still tops out at 1TB.

Adata SC750 Specs

External Design 

The Adata SC750 sports the same distinctive wide, flat shape that the company has been using for years, which we saw most recently with the SD810 – except the SC750 is much smaller.

At 2.09 x 1.08 x 0.47 inches, the SC750 is about half the size of the SK hynix Tube T31, especially with its USB-C port retracted into its plastic shell. That said, like the Tube T31, the SC750's width means it will often block nearby ports. Specifically, when it's plugged into my Asus Zenbook 14, the second USB-C port is blocked. These SSD sticks do have their drawbacks, despite their speed and cable-free designs. 

Inside the SC750

Popping open the plastic housing, it's clear how Adata's drive manages to be smaller than the competing SK Hynix model. Adata has foregone a physical M.2-to-USB interface and instead put its flash and other components directly on a PCB that includes the USB-C port.

The other side of the PCB hosts another flash package (on our 1TB model), as well as a Silicon Motion SM2320G controller, underneath a thermal pad that would probably be more effective if the housing were metal rather than plastic.

SK hynix's larger internal frame, though, makes room for metal heatsinks on both sides, so I'd expect it to perform better during sustained write tasks than Adata's SC750, with its all-plastic shell.

Comparison Products

The Adata SC750 is already selling below its MSRP on Amazon, at $59 for the 500GB model and $79 for the 1TB version we tested. A company representative told us the 2TB model, when it arrives in September, will sport an MSRP of $142. If that model's street price slips below $140, it should be quite appealing.

That said, when we wrote this, the competing SK hynix Tube T31 was selling for $69 for the 1TB model, or $10 less than the Adata drive at the same capacity. It is on sale, however, so the Adata drive might be cheaper than the Tube T31 by the time you read this. Kingston's DataTraveler Max, another speedy flash drive that you'll find in our test results below, was selling for $81 at the 1TB when we wrote this.

Trace Testing - PCMark 10 Storage Benchmark

PCMark 10 is a trace-based benchmark that uses a wide-ranging set of real-world traces from popular applications and everyday tasks to measure the performance of storage devices.

The differences near the top of this chart are mostly close enough to fall between general run-to-run variance. But the Adata SC750 comes in third here, just ahead of the SK hynix Tube T31.

Transfer Rates – DiskBench

We use the DiskBench storage benchmarking tool to test real-world file transfer performance with a custom 10GB dataset. We copy 4,617 files (images, videos, and software ISO files) to a folder on the test drive (write). Then, after leaving the system idle for at least five minutes, we run the same test in reverse, moving the test folder to a different location on our PCIe 4.0 testing drive.

On this test, the Tube T31 landed on top on real-world read speeds, with the SC750 in second place. But the Adata drive is actually faster on the write portion of this test than the SK hynix drive.

Synthetic Testing CrystalDiskMark

CrystalDiskMark (CDM) is a free and easy-to-run storage benchmarking tool that SSD companies commonly use to assign product performance specifications. It gives us insight into how each device handles different file sizes. We run this test at its default settings.

On this synthetic sequential test, the Tube T31 beats the SC750 in both reads and writes, though there's not much difference between the two – especially when it comes to read speeds. Both are right up against the limitations of their 10Gbps interface.

When it comes to small files, neither the Adata or SK hynix drives are in the top three of models we've tested, but the Adata drive manages to just barely beat the SK hynix Tube T31 in reads, while the Tube T31 is significantly faster in small file writes.

Conclusion

In our testing, the Adata SC750 was a little slower overall compared to the larger SK hynix Tube T31, but not in ways you'd likely notice without benchmarks. And while the Adata drive is just coming onto the market, the two drives seem like they're going to be priced similarly.

The hynix drive sports a USB Type-A port under a cap, while the Adata SC750 uses a retractable USB-C connector (so there's no cap to lose). Both drives are about as speedy as you can currently get in the "flash drive" or "stick SSD" form factor. So if you're stuck deciding between the two, I'd opt for whichever model has the port that's more convenient to your use cases or whichever one is on sale for less. Still, if you like these drives and need 2TB, the Adata SC750 is your only option – or at least it will be when the more spacious model goes on sale, sometime in September.

Yesterday, Sabrent gave the world a sneak peek of the world's first Thunderbolt 5 external SSD, using and benchmarking a prototype unit to establish baseline expectations for the next generation of external storage. The reveal from Sabrent comes just under a year after the official Thunderbolt 5 debut, which provided specs of a maximum 80 Gigabits bidirectional throughput (roughly 10 GB/s read/write theoretical maximum). Meanwhile, a TB5 Bandwidth Boost mode intended for displays reduces receive speeds to 40 Gigabits per second to boost transmit speeds to 120 Gigabits per second. However, this wouldn't be suited for external storage.

The sneak peek from Sabrent includes a brief peek at CrystalDiskMark benchmarking scores, which currently place the drive at around the speed level of an internal NVMe Gen 4 drive. 6 GB/s read and 5 GB/s write is nothing to scoff at— though, as one who has observed the original Intel presentation of the Thunderbolt 5 standard, it seems clear that there is still room for improvement. The Sabrent spokesperson in the video even says as much, saying, "There are still a few little tweaks we still have to do because we want to make the most out of this technology."

Sabrent Thunderbolt 5 Prototype SSD Specifications

• Drive Type: Thunderbolt 5 External SSD
• Compatible Connectors: Thunderbolt 5 (recommended), Thunderbolt 4, Thunderbolt 3, USB 3.2 (Type-C Required)
• Estimated Read Speed: Up to 6071 MB/s in CrystalDiskMark
• Estimated Write Speed: Up to 5126 MB/s in CrystalDiskMark

While it's unclear how much improvements can be made to throughput this early on in the lifecycle of Thunderbolt 5 SSDs, it's clear that Sabrent isn't focused on just throughput— the video also spends time on the device's size and apparent cool thermals. Those who remember the launch cycle of NVMe Gen 4 on desktop may also recognize it as the generation where NVMe heatsinks became commonplace due to concerns of the far-faster drives overheating— a concern that was slightly overblown in Gen 4 but became a real problem in Gen 5.

So, there's a fair chance that the apparent gap between the current maximum throughput of this debut Thunderbolt 5 SSD isn't due to fundamental bandwidth— it shouldn't be since up to 10 GB/s should be possible over read and write over Thunderbolt 5— but instead, achieving those speeds while maintaining low temperatures in a portable form factor may be a challenging feat of engineering.

In any case, the world's first Thunderbolt 5 SSD, managing speeds on par with mid-tier NVMe Gen 4 drives with no apparent thermal or portability issues, is still quite impressive. It should also bode well for the future of gaming and productivity tasks off external storage.

After years of capacity stagnation at 5TB, Western Digital recently upped its top-capacity portable hard drives to 6TB. Today we're testing the 6TB My Passport specifically, though the gaming-focused WD Black and the more basic Essential line will also be getting the same capacity bump.

The capacity jump comes with an increase in z-height, with the 6TB model being 0.81 inches thick to the 5TB's 0.75 inches. So it's likely that the company simply added an extra platter over the 5TB model we looked at back in 2020. And given the thickness of the internal drive, it's unlikely these 2.5-inch drives will land in applications other than external storage.

But how does the 6TB My Passport perform, and how does it stack up in a world of faster, more durable, high-capacity external SSDs? We'll have to test the drive to find out, but one thing's for certain: You aren't going to find one of the best external SSDs with even 4TB of capacity for close to the WD My Passport 6TB's $180 asking price.

Western Digital My Passport Specs

Design and Accessories for the WD My Passport (6TB)

As you can see from the specs table above, the thickness of WD's My Passport drives increases at every capacity pump — starting at 0.44 inches for 1TB, and nearly doubling that (0.81 inches) for the 6TB model. The drives come with a plastic shell that's gray on the bottom, but with a top lid that's available in white, red, blue, or black (the model we were shipped). The color options are nice, but the fact that those colors are only a part of the top lid (making the blue and red models look particularly odd) shows just how much WD has cut costs with these drives.

Another way the company cuts costs is with the connector and cable. The cable is a convenient 18-inch length and has USB-A on one end but USB Micro-B on the other. Yes, USB Micro-B: the two-pronged 5Gbps connector that I would have expected on a drive in, say, 2014 — not in 2024.

To be fair to WD, you can buy a version of this drive with a USB-C cable on the drive side, but it costs $5 more and only comes in gray. It seems strange that the company is bothering to make two versions of its portable hard drives with two different connectors at all, especially when the more mainstream / lower-priced version uses a cable type that's more than a decade old and was never very popular outside of external storage drives anyway.

Overall, the 6TB WD drive feels a bit chunky and hefty (it weighs nearly half a pound) for an external hard drive, and it's positively massive compared to most modern external SSDs. Crucial's X9 and X10 drives are about 1/6th the size, though they do top out at 4TB. Samsung's T5 Evo SSD is about half the size and houses up to 8TB of storage. But the Samsung drive is in another price league (at around $600) — as is SanDisk's recently released Desk Drive, which is bigger than all three of those drives combined, but requires external power and is meant, as its name implies, to remain semi-permanently on your desk.

Security and Software

WD ships its My Passport drives with a utility for both PC and Mac that integrates a few different programs for drive maintenance, security, and backups. Oddly, the Windows installer that shipped on our review unit would not install on one PC, hanging at 18%. The front-end installed on a second PC, but when I clicked on the individual apps, the install button would briefly turn into what looked like a loading bar — and after several seconds, the install button would just reappear, not allowing me to install WD's programs (though I did eventually get one of the three to install using this method).

I hope this isn't a widespread issue with the company's software installer. But the programs can be grabbed individually here, and I had no issues installing and running them when downloading them individually (rather than through the company's installer front-end).

WD Security is what you'll use to set up and manage the drive's 256-bit AES hardware encryption / password. It's very straightforward since it doesn't do a whole lot.

On the backup front for Windows users, there's Acronis True Image, a venerable program for backing up and cloning drives. You can use it to make full system backups or to back up specific folders. The software also includes other tools, for tasks such as drive cleaning and making rescue media.

Lastly, WD Drive Utilities lets you test the drive for failure issues, set how soon the drive sleeps when not in use, and even turn off the tiny activity LED. You can also format and name the drive from this app, with options for NTFS and exFAT. These features are of course built into Windows, but for those not so familiar with Microsoft's OS (or unwilling to search through menus), it's an easy-to-find, easy-to-use alternative to the Disk Management window.

Comparison Products

We don't regularly review portable hard drives. In fact, the last model we tested was the 5TB WD My Passport drive over four years ago. And while we'll occasionally reference the results of that drive, our storage testbed has changed multiple times since 2020, so we won't be charting that drive in or test results below.

Instead, we'll be comparing the 6TB WD My Passport to Samsung's T5 Evo, an 8TB portable SSD that, while roomy, is quite slow for a solid-state drive. Also on our charts will be one of the best flash drives we've tested, Kingston's DataTraveler Max (1TB); as well as Samsung's mainstream T7 Shield (2TB); and our current pick for a fast 20Gbps external SSD, Crucial's X10 Pro.

Obviously, as a hard drive, the My Passport is going to trail the SSDs in most (if not all) of our tests. But keep in mind that, at around $180, the 6TB hard drive is priced less than even a 2TB Samsung T7 Shield — and the 8TB Samsung T5 Evo usually sells for close to $600. So if you need a lot of capacity and not a lot of speed, a portable hard drive can still be a compelling value.

Trace Testing - PCMark 10 Storage Benchmark

PCMark 10 is a trace-based benchmark that uses a wide-ranging set of real-world traces from popular applications and everyday tasks to measure the performance of storage devices.

WD's My Passport takes the last-place spot here — again, as we'd expect for a hard drive. But it's actually not far off from the T5 Evo SSD results on this test, both in its score and bandwidth.

Transfer Rates – DiskBench

We use the DiskBench storage benchmarking tool to test real-world file transfer performance with a custom 50GB dataset. We copy 4,617 files (images, videos, and software ISO files) to a folder on the test drive (write). Then, after leaving the system idle for five minutes, we run the same test in reverse, moving the test folder to a different location on our PCIe 4.0 testing drive.

Again, the WD drive lands in last place, behind even the "slow' Samsung T5 SSD. Having said that, the drive's 109 MB/s read speed does match what we saw on the 5TB version of this drive back in 2020. The nearly 96 MB/s write speed is also faster than the 85 MB/s we saw on the 5TB drive in 2020, but that test was performed using different files (and a smaller test size of 25GB), so the two aren't strictly comparable.

Synthetic Testing CrystalDiskMark

CrystalDiskMark (CDM) is a free and easy-to-run storage benchmarking tool that SSD companies commonly use to assign product performance specifications. It gives us insight into how each device handles different file sizes. We run this test at its default settings.

In this synthetic test, the WD drive was a bit faster than our previous real-world scenario. But 123 MB/s reads and 114 MB/s writes are still more than three times slower than the slowest SSD we've tested lately, Samsung's T5 Evo.

When it comes to IOPS, the SSDs are in another league, again as we'd expect.

Sustained Write Performance

A drive's rated write specifications are only a piece of the performance picture. Most external SSDs (just like their internal counterparts) implement a write cache — or a fast area of flash, programmed to perform like faster SLC — that absorbs incoming data. Sustained write speeds often suffer tremendously when the workload saturates the cache and slips into the "native" TLC or QLC flash. We use Iometer to hammer the SSD (or hard drive, in this case) with sequential writes for 15 minutes to measure its sustained performance.

The pale blue line of the WD My Passport drive may be way down at the bottom, but, outside of a few random dips, its performance was steady in our testing, with the drive writing predominantly between 107 and 120 MB/s. While, like its predecessor, the drive is almost certainly an SMR (Shingled Magnetic Recording) drive (which overlaps data tracks to increase density) its write performance was consistent across our 15-minute test and beyond. We let our test run for a full 30 mins, and while we did notice more instances of writes falling just below 100 MB/s in the last 10 minutes or so, write speed averaged 112.5 MB/s for the full 30-minute test.

Conclusion

For many enthusiasts and those who need faster speed and more durability than spinning platters can offer, hard drives can almost feel like retro tech these days. I personally stated that I'd never buy a hard drive again back in 2018 (and I haven't since then). But while SSD capacities have risen (and will soon rise even more), the cost of SSDs has also increased dramatically in the last year.

So for those who need lots of space but not a lot of speed for media libraries, backups, or on-the-go project files, a high-capacity portable hard drive can still be a compelling alternative – especially when you can get a 6TB drive for about $180, when most 4TB portable SSDs have climbed back up close to $300.

WD's updated My Passport drive (as well as other external hard drive lines from WD) offers the highest capacity of any available portable hard drive, as well as built-in hardware-based security, at a reasonable price (especially compared to SSDs). I just wish the company would ditch the clunky, dated Micro-B USB interface. And just like with SSDs, you'll pay extra for the highest possible capacity. As of this writing, the 6TB model sells for $180, while the 5TB model sells for $127. So if you don't need that last terabyte, you can save yourself fifty bucks by opting for a slightly smaller capacity.

The Lexar brand has a storied storage history, dating back to the mid-90s, but its keen to produce some of the best external SSDs here in 2024, and its two latest attempts on that front are a pair of USB 3.2 Gen 2 2x2 (20 Gbps) drives, the Professional SL600 and the more recent SL500.

These drives feel solid, and in many of our benchmarks they also perform well. But we had some odd performance issues with the SL500 in our Iometer sustained write testing. And both of these drives face stiff competition in performance and price from Lexar's former parent company, Micron, in the form of the Crucial X10 Pro.

For those who haven't been paying close attention to the Lexar brand in recent years, it was acquired by Micron (makers of Crucial memory and SSDs) in 2006, but eventually sold to Shenzhen-based Longsys. And since 2018 its current owners have been steadily pushing out storage products, from gaming RAM to internal SSDs to flash drives.

Specifications

Design and Accessories for the Lexar SL500 and Professional SL600

Lexar ships both the SL500 and Professional SL600 solely with a USB-C to USB-C cable. This makes sense, given that you basically need a USB-C port (of the rare 3.2 Gen 2 2x2 variety) to get anywhere close to the rated speed of these drives.

The Professional drive is bigger and thicker (0.42 inches), likely in part to aid in cooling, and because it has a large hook section at the top for clipping it onto your bag or whatever you want. It's a closed loop though, so you'll have to provide your own carabiner or hook.

The SL500 is smaller and slimmer, with tapered edges that are less than 0.2 inches thick. Both drives' shells are made of black metal that does a pretty decent job of attracting smudges from hand oils. But they don't attract dust and dirt the way the rubberized coatings of Samsung's competing drives do.

Neither of the Lexar drives are particularly big or bulky like LaCie's Rugged SSD Mini, and either should fit well in most pockets. But they're both considerably larger than Crucial's recent drives like the X9 and X10 Pro.

Regardless, it's not like any of these drives are going to take up much space in your on-the-go world. And at 43 grams for the SL500 and 64 grams for the SL600, you won't notice their weight, either. Samsung's T9 Pro weighs more than both of Lexar's drives put together, at 122 grams.

In terms of capacity, both Lexar drives are offered in 512GB, 1TB, and the 2TB capacities that we tested. Lexar tells us the SL500 will also be getting a 4TB option, but that capacity wasn't widely available when we wrote this.

Software of the Lexar LS500 and Professional SL600

Lexar ships these drives with its DataShield software. It prompts you to create a password for 256-bit software-based encryption. But beyond that, it's mostly a basic file explorer, with tools for changing your password, backing up and restoring data, and formatting the drive. The software looks good and performed flawlessly in my time using it. It just doesn't have many features.

Comparison Products

Our latest storage testbed is built around an MSI Z90 MEG ACE motherboard and an Intel Core i5-12600K CPU. This system gives us native Thunderbolt 4 ports and a USB 3.2 Gen 2 2x2 port via the front header (connected through Corsair's 5000D Airflow case).

As our test rig is still fairly new, we have limited comparisons, but they are growing as we test and review more drives. In the charts below, we've included a Sabrent Rocket Nano XTRM Thunderbolt 3 drive ($170 for our 1TB), which has more bandwidth (40Gb/s) at its disposal than the other drives.

To see how other 20 Gb/s USB drives compare, we've included Kingston's XS200 ($305 for the 4TB model we tested) and Crucial's X10 Pro ($197 when we wrote this), as well as a trio of lower-end 10Gb/s USB drives: Samsung's T7 Shield ($170, 2TB), Kingston's SX1000 ($106, 2TB), and Crucial's X9 Pro ($160, 2TB). Also included is one of our favorite recent budget drives, Silicon Power's PX10 ($140, 2TB). Lastly, for some perspective, we've also included one of the best flash drives we've tested, Kingston's DataTraveler Max (1TB, $90).

Our 2TB Lexar drives will face stiff competition, especially the SL500, with its MSRP of $229.99. We're already seeing that drive listed on Amazon for a bit under $200 though, which is more expensive than we're currently seeing the Professional SL600 sell for at B&H. Given what we'll see in testing, it's hard to recommend anyone pay more for the SL500 than the SL600. And both drives will face stiff competition from the $197 2TB Crucial X10 Pro. That drive has also previously been on sale for significantly less.

Trace Testing - PCMark 10 Storage Benchmark

PCMark 10 is a trace-based benchmark that uses a wide-ranging set of real-world traces from popular applications and everyday tasks to measure the performance of storage devices.

Among the drives we've run through our new testbed, the higher-bandwidth Sabrent still holds the top spot on this test. But the Lexar drives land in between LaCie's Rugged Mini ($190). This is a good first showing for Lexar's drives, but Crucial's X10 Pro is just behind the Professional SL600.

Transfer Rates – DiskBench

We use the DiskBench storage benchmarking tool to test real-world file transfer performance with a custom 50GB dataset. We copy 4,617 files (images, videos, and software ISO files) to a folder on the test drive (write). Then, after leaving the system idle for five minutes, we run the same test in reverse, moving the test folder to a different location on our PCIe 4.0 testing drive.

Once again, Lexar's drives land near the top, with the SL500 this time a slot behind the LaCie, and the X10 Pro sandwiched between the SL500 and SL600 drives. Note also that the Lexar and Crucial X10 Pro drives beat the LaCie when it comes to writes.

Synthetic Testing CrystalDiskMark

CrystalDiskMark (CDM) is a free and easy-to-run storage benchmarking tool that SSD companies commonly use to assign product performance specifications. It gives us insight into how each device handles different file sizes. We run this test at its default settings.

On this sequential test, the Professional SL600 finally pulls ahead of its consumer-focused SL500 sibling. And the SL500 is no slouch, besting Samsung's T9 on reads, and easily beating out Crucial's X10 Pro in both reads and writes.

When it comes to IOPS, we see the familiar grouping of both Lexar drives landing behind the LaCie, and sandwiching Crucial's X10 Pro. That's just looking at random reads, though. When it comes to random writes, both Lexar drives do better than the Crucial, though as in most other tests so far, all three are fairly close to one another.

Sustained Write Performance

A drive's rated write specifications are only a piece of the performance picture. Most external SSDs (just like their internal counterparts) implement a write cache, or a fast area of flash, programmed to perform like faster SLC, that absorbs incoming data.

Sustained write speeds often suffer tremendously when the workload saturates the cache and slips into the "native" TLC or QLC flash. We use Iometer to hammer the SSD with sequential writes for 15 minutes to measure the size of the write cache and performance after the cache is saturated.

In this, the most grueling of our storage benchmarks, Lexar's SL500 shows its limitations. For about a minute and a half, it writes at an impressive speed of just under 1,800 MB/s, then drops down to just above 1400, then drops much lower, to 1,200 and then below 800 MB/s, before recovering back to the 1,200 MB/s and falling back below 800, then repeating that pattern for the rest of our test.

It's worth pointing out you may never see this behavior when using the SL500, unless you write very quickly to the drive for more than three minutes. And the SL500 isn't marketed as a professional drive, so we wouldn't expect it to write at top speeds for prolonged periods.

Lexar's Professional SL600, meanwhile, looks quite a bit better here, though it still suffers a drop. It writes at just under 1,800 MB/s for, again, about 90 seconds, before dropping to the mid-1,400s, where it stays for the duration of our test. This is a solid showing, and worthy of its pro-class name.

But note that Crucial's X10 Pro was able to maintain its write speed in the mid-1,700s for roughly 11 minutes before it finally fell into the 1,400 range for the rest of our test. That makes the Crucial drive a better bet for tasks that involve frequent massive writes, like filling the drive with uncompressed video footage. It doesn't hurt that it's much smaller than the Professional SL600, and costs less.

Test Bench and Testing Notes

We use an Intel Alder Lake platform, with most background applications such as indexing, Windows updates, and anti-virus disabled in the OS to reduce run-to-run variability.

Conclusion

 If you aren't going to often be filling up and emptying your SSD, Lexar's SL500 will likely serve you well enough. It landed near the top of our charts in most of our tests. But the behavior we saw in our Iometer testing makes it hard to recommend when priced near $200, given the many other USB 3.2 Gen 2 2x2 drives on the market, many of which cost less.

The Lexar Professional SL600 is a more reliable performer, and it held up well where the SL500 fell, in our sustained write test. That said, it wasn't the best performer we've seen on that front, which is a problem when Crucial's X10 Plus performed better on the same test. Crucial's drive is about half the physical size of the SL600 and costs about $13 more as of this writing, though it's hovered in the $180 range for most of 2024. If you are after a fast 20 Gbps USB drive for professional tasks, the Professional SL600 is worth considering if you find it on sale. But if the Crucial X10 Pro is selling for the same price or even slightly more, that's still the drive we'd choose in this category. 

MORE: Best SSDs

MORE: Best Hard Drives

MORE: Best External SSDs

Even though faster interfaces like USB4 and Thunderbolt 5 are here (to varying degrees), every storage company seems determined to release a 20 Gbps external SSD. And PNY is no exception, offering up its rubber-coated, flat-cabled RP60 in 1TB and 2TB capacities. Its exterior mimics the feel of drives like Samsung's T7 Shield, though its light 54-gram weight and some shell flex doesn't convey the same kind of ruggedness as other drives. It is, though, rated against water and dust (IP65) and accidental props of up to 3 meters. It also picks up all kinds of dust and pocket lint, just like Samsung's rubber-clad drives.

The RP60's performance is, for the most part, fairly good, particularly in our sequential read and write tests, where it put up some of the best results we've seen from a USB 3.2 Gen2 2x2 drive. That said, none of its performance truly stands out, unless you count our Iometer test, where we saw speeds drop by more than half in about 90 seconds, and eventually fall below 400 MBps.

That's far from the worst we've seen. And of course you have to hammer the drive with fast writes to get it to such a cache-saturated slow state, so many users might never see this issue. The problem is, at $99 for the 1TB model we tested and $179 for the top-capacity 2TB model, it's priced about the same or slightly more than Crucial's X10 Pro, which performs better overall, is much smaller, and feels more solidly built.

PNY RP60 specs

Design and Accessories for the PNY RP60

At 3.83 x 2.36 x 0.49 inches and 53 grams (that's according to my coffee scale, as PNY doesn't list the drive's weight) and wrapped rubber with crisscrossing lines on the front, the RP60 is bigger than many recent drives, but it doesn't feel bulky. It does have a handy hole for clipping the drive to a bag or something else. Still, Crucial's X10 and X9 drives are about half this size, and feel more substantial with metal shells. The PNY drive's shell feels like plastic – especially on the top where there is some noticeable flex.

The PNY RP60 comes with a foot-long USB-C-to-USB-C cable that's wide and flat like a ribbon cable. I'm not sure if that's better than standard round cables. But at the very least, if you're swimming in an ocean of cables like I am, many of them lacking in bandwidth, it'll be easy to tell that this is the 20 Gbps cable that shipped with your SSD.

In terms of software, the drive ships with Acronis True Image, a solid drive backup mainstay that SanDisk also includes with its Desk Drive Desktop SSD. Not everyone wants or needs backup software (or any software) with their external storage. But what PNY provides is at least a decent choice that will be familiar to many enthusiasts and IT veterans.

Comparison Products

We've tested several 20 Gbps SSDs in recent months, including the budget-priced Adata SD810 and LaCie's bulky Rugged Mini SSD. But Crucial's X10 Pro is still our favorite USB 3.2 Gen2 2x2 drive, and it's currently selling for the same $99 for the 1TB capacity as PNY's drive. At the 2TB capacity, the X10 Pro sells for $5 less than the PNY drive ($174.99). Let's see how well PNY's RP60 stacks up to these and other recent external SSDs.

Trace Testing - PCMark 10 Storage Benchmark

PCMark 10 is a trace-based benchmark that uses a wide-ranging set of real-world traces from popular applications and everyday tasks to measure the performance of storage devices.

On this first test, the PNY RP60 turns in a decent showing, just behind Crucial's X10 Pro. LaCie's pricier drive does better, as does the cheaper ADATA SD810. And Sabrent's Thunderbolt Nano XTRM lands on top, thanks to its extra bandwidth.

Transfer Rates – DiskBench

We use the DiskBench storage benchmarking tool to test file transfer performance with a custom 50GB dataset. We copy 4,617 files (images, videos, and software ISO files) to a folder on the test drive (write). Then, after leaving the system idle for five minutes, we run the same test in reverse, moving the test folder to a different location on our PCIe 4.0 testing drive.

Things look a little better for the PNY drive in our real-world file transfer test, where its read speed of 1295 MBps puts it slightly ahead of the Crucial drive, though its write speed is somewhat slower than Crucial's result. Once again, the LaCie and ADATA drives both do better here.

Synthetic Testing CrystalDiskMark

CrystalDiskMark (CDM) is a free and easy-to-run storage benchmarking tool that SSD companies commonly use to assign performance specifications to their products. It gives us insight into how each device handles different file sizes. We run this test at its default settings.

Here, the PNY RP60 looks its best, landing in second place overall in reads writes, while the Crucial drive is noticeably slower.

When it comes to random writes/IOPS, PNY's drive returns to its spot just below the Crucial X10 Pro (and the X9 Pro), and neither of those drives are close to the top of this chart. The budget-priced Silicon Power PX10 stands out here, beating the LaCie drive that costs much more.

Sustained Write Performance

A drive's rated write specifications are only a piece of the performance picture. Most external SSDs (just like their internal counterparts) implement a write cache, or a fast area of flash, programmed to perform like faster SLC, that absorbs incoming data. Sustained write speeds often suffer tremendously when the workload saturates the cache and slips into the "native" TLC or QLC flash. We use Iometer to hammer the SSD with sequential writes for 15 minutes to measure both the size of the write cache and performance after the cache is saturated.

This is the most grueling of our storage benchmarks, and the one most important for creative professionals who move lots of data. Here, the Crucial X10 Pro was able to deliver write speeds above 1700 MBps for about 11 minutes. And the PNY? As you can see from its gray line, it only maintained that speed for roughly 30 seconds, before dropping into the 1400 MBps range, then below 1200 MBps, then to 800 MBps, before finally settling in at a steady sub-400 MBps after about four minutes.

Again, not everyone needs this level of sustained speedy write speeds. After all, you could transfer quite a bit of data in the 90 seconds or so that the PNY drive maintains write speeds above 1,000 MBps in this test. And if your source drive isn't as fast as the PNY drive, you may not see this kind of slowdown at all. But considering Crucial's X10 Pro is about as fast in most other tests and much speedier in sustained performance, for about the same price or less, it's tough to argue for the PNY RP60, at least at its current price.

Conclusion

PNY's RP60 portable SSD delivers very good sequential performance in most of our benchmarks, sports an interesting flat USB cable, and ships with Acronis True Image, which is handy for backups and drive cloning. But at its current price of $99 (1TB) and $179 (2TB), it's tough to recommend given its flimsy-feeling build quality and poor sustained write speeds compared to the similarly priced Crucial X10 Pro. The Crucial drive is also about half the size of the PNY, is lighter , and feels much more solid.

MORE: Best SSDs

MORE: Best Hard Drive

MORE: Best External SSDs

In many ways, SanDisk's latest backup drive feels like a throwback. As its Desk Drive name implies, it's designed to live solely on your desk, unlike most of the best external SSDs we've tested in recent years. And it requires an external power brick, alongside its USB connection (native USB-C, though a USB-A adapter is included.

This makes the drive feel more like an old-school external desktop hard drive than an SSD, which is as intended since SanDisk positions its Desk Drive SSD  as a replacement for people who've owned backup drives in the past, but want something fast and spacious.

The Desk Drive is definitely faster than a hard drive, as it's a 10 Gbps SSD, and quite spacious for a solid-state drive (4TB and 8TB versions are available at launch). For those who want a single desk-bound plug-in data repository for irreplaceable files and fast access to large project libraries you're working on, it's a solid option – and one without much direct competition in the mainstream storage space. Samsung sells an 8TB T5 Evo drive, but it's about half as fast as the Desk Drive, as we'll see in our testing, and is designed to be portable. SanDisk's drive, at an MSRP of $699, is about $100 more than the current price of the 8TB T5 Evo. But we'd expect street pricing for the Desk Drive to soon fall below its suggested price. Samsung's launch price for its 8TB T5 Evo late last year was $649.  

SanDisk Desk Drive specs 

Design of the SanDisk Desk Drive

At 3.9 inches x 3.9 inches and 1.58 inches tall, with a concave top and an orange stripe running through its black-plastic mid-section, the SanDisk Desk Drive looks more like a set-top streaming box than any external SSD we've tested in recent years. And at 0.59 pounds, it's heavy in a way that's clearly unnecessary from a practical standpoint, other than to keep it from sliding around on your desk – helped by a large rubber-bottomed base. It's also much larger than more traditional external SSDs designed for portability.

From left to right in the image above is Samsung's T5 Evo drive, the SanDisk Desk Drive, Lacie's Rugged Mini SSD, Crucial's X10 Pro, and one of the Best Flash Drives, SK hynix Tube T31.

But weight and size, beyond a certain point at least, isn't generally important for something designed to stay on your desk all the time. The extra heft of the Desk Drive gives it at least a superficial sense of quality, and likely will comfort some users who are transitioning from a similarly heavy external hard drive.

Ports, in the form of USB-C and the power adapter's barrel connector, are around back. It feels like the company missed an opportunity here to add some extra USB ports and turn the drive into a sort of hub. But that would of course raise costs. And as we'll see shortly in our benchmark testing, the Desk Drive uses basically all of its 10 Gbps (USB 3.2 Gen2) bandwidth.

Accessories and Software

The drive doesn't come with much in the way of accessories. Apart from its compact power adapter, you get a USB-C cable, as well as a USB-A adapter that clips onto one end.

For Mac users, the drive supports Time Machine. And for Windows users, there's a link on the drive to download Acronis software, although it's somewhat confusingly named Acronis True Image for Western Digital. WD bought SanDisk back in 2016. But it's likely many of the kinds of users SanDisk is aiming for with this device won't know that, and will be wondering why they're installing backup software designed for what was a competing company.

For those on the Windows side, Acronis True Image has long been a respected program for backing up and cloning drives. You can use it to make full system backups or choose specific folders. The software also includes other tools, like drive cleaning and making rescue media. And while the native Acronis interface looks dated, the skin that WD has built on top of it is clean and intuitive.

I used the software to do a full backup of the boot drive of the system I installed it on, and it took about 10 minutes from start to finish to handle 281GB of files.

Note that Acronis now charges $50 a year for this software, and the license that ships with this drive expires in five years. So for those who will actually make use of a number of these software features, it's a significant added value.

Comparison Products

As an 8TB external SSD, the Desk Drive's only direct competition (outside of multi-drive solutions aimed at enterprise and high-end content creators),, is Samsung's 8TB T5 Evo. It's a lot smaller and more portable in the sense that it's bus-powered, so doesn't need an external power brick. But as we'll see in testing below, it's also a lot slower in most tests than the SanDisk drive.

For a look at what kind of extra speed is available for systems that have faster USB 3.2 Gen2 2x2 ports, we'll also look at the results from Crucial's X10 Pro. That drive is also smaller than both the Desk Drive and Samsung's T5 and is powered solely by its USB port. But like most external SSDs, its capacity tops out at just 4TB.

Trace Testing - PCMark 10 Storage Benchmark

PCMark 10 is a trace-based benchmark that uses a wide-ranging set of real-world traces from popular applications and everyday tasks to measure the performance of storage devices.

SanDisk's drive starts out impressive here, obliterating the T5 Evo, which is hiding at the bottom of the chart, and only being bested by Sabrent's Rocket Nano XTRM, a Thunderbolt drive with basically four times that SanDisk's bandwidth.

Transfer Rates – DiskBench

We use the DiskBench storage benchmarking tool to test real-world file transfer performance with a custom 50GB dataset. We copy 4,617 files (images, videos, and software ISO files) to a folder on the test drive (write). Then, after leaving the system idle for five minutes, we run the same test in reverse, moving the test folder to a different location on our PCIe 4.0 testing drive.

Things look quite different in this real-world file transfer test. The SanDisk drive still easily beats Samsung's T5 Evo, as well as the faster T7 Shield. But other 10 Gbps drives, like Crucial's X9 Pro and our budget SSD favorite, the Silicon Power PX10 do better here. And 20 Gbps options like the X10 Pro and LaCie's Rugged Mini are in another league – as we'd expect due to their higher bandwidth.

Synthetic Testing CrystalDiskMark

CrystalDiskMark (CDM) is a free and easy-to-run storage benchmarking tool that SSD companies commonly use to assign product performance specifications. It gives us insight into how each device handles different file sizes. We run this test at its default settings.

The SanDisk Desk Drive pretty much saturates its 10 Gbps bus in our sequential Crystal DiskMark test, easily topping 1000 MBps in reads and writes. That's enough to beat the two Samsung drives and a couple other contenders, but Silicon Power's PX10 again comes out just slightly ahead.

The Desk Drive again looks good in this random read / write test, beating everything else on reads, save for Sabrent's Thunderbolt drive. On writes, it's not quite as impressive but still delivers solid results – especially compared to the 8TB Samsung T5 Evo, which really struggles here.

Sustained Write Performance

A drive's rated write specifications are only a piece of the performance picture. Most external SSDs (just like their internal counterparts) implement a write cache, or a fast area of flash, programmed to perform like faster SLC, that absorbs incoming data.

Sustained write speeds often suffer tremendously when the workload saturates the cache and slips into the "native" TLC or QLC flash. We use Iometer to hammer the SSD with sequential writes for 15 minutes to measure the size of the write cache and performance after the cache is saturated.

We've stripped a few drives from the above chart, for the sake of clarity. As you can see from its purple line, the SanDisk Desk Drive is remarkably consistent. The drive maintains a write speed of between 1010 and 1017 MB/s throughout our 15-minute test run. In fact, it maintained that through a full 30 minutes of writes. That's not the fastest result we've tested, but it's about the best you can expect from a 10 Gbps drive, and I've never seen an external drive this consistent in its write capabilities.

Conclusion

To those interested in modern portable drives, SanDisk's Desk Drive Desktop SSD is going to seem like an anachronism. Why tie your storage down to a desk and require external power when most external SSDs have been bus-powered and pocketable for years? But the same could be said for desktop PCs when laptops have offered portable computing for decades. And yet, I sit here, typing this on a custom-built desktop because it offers features and a specific kind of convenience that are helpful to my workflow.

The same can be said for SanDisk's Desk Drive. The company envisions it as a local repository for backups and project files that you're actively working on. Its external power requirement  is clunky in some ways, but it means you can basically plug the drive into any USB port, including Type-A, and it will just work (although slower ports will of course mean slower speeds). It also won't drain your battery if you plug it into a laptop to access or offload lots of files.

SanDisk envisions this as the first of a line of drives, with plans for a 16TB Desk Drive by mid-2025. Clearly, the company is confident that there's a market for mainstream desk-bound solid-state storage. And for those who want portable solid-state storage, WD and SanDisk offer several drives with capacities up to 4TB. That said, its portable drives have suffered a reputation hit over the last year or so. Hopefully for SanDisk, the larger footprint of the Desk Drive means any manufacturing issues with previous drives have been avoided here.

If you're after a spacious, desk-bound solid-state drive and you aren't using a desktop where you could just install a couple of 4TB M.2 drives for less, SanDisk's Desk Drive is a unique (at least in its top capacity) and well-performing offering. The 8TB model delivered consistent performance in the 1000 MB/s range in our testing. Samsung offers a portable drive with 8TB of storage for less, but that drive is much slower in both its rated specs and our own testing than SanDisk's drive.

For capacity and speed, the 8TB Desk Drive is tough to beat, although it will be easier to recommend if its street price settles closer to $600 or $650 than its MSRP of $699. But even then, SanDisk might have a tough time convincing most people who have previously owned external hard drives for backup. Because while a spinning platter drive will be much slower and likely more prone to failure, an 8TB external hard drive costs $135-$160. That's a whole lot less than $600-$700.

MORE: Best SSDs

MORE: Best External SSDs

MORE: How We Test HDDs And SSDs

The line between flash drives and external SSDs has become increasingly indistinct, and Sk hynix's Tube T31 arguably cranks the blur on the line up to its highest level yet. The South Korean storage giant refers to its drive as "a portable and high-speed USB SSD," but it has a "thumb-drive" form factor and a built-in 10 Gbps USB-A port that will feel instantly familiar to anyone who's owned a flash drive in the last 20-plus years.

Perhaps more importantly, the Tube T31 is faster overall in our testing than any flash drive we've tested to date, even beating out USB-C models like Kingston's DataTraveler Max on most tests. While it won't give you the 20 Gbps speeds of some of the best external SSDs, it's the fastest USB-A flash drive we've tested, and a strong contender for our Best Flash Drives list.

My only real complaints about the Tube T31 are that it's bulky for a flash drive, and there's no 2TB model. It would also be easier to recommend if it were priced $5-10 less for the 1TB model I tested. But when I wrote this, the SK hynix drive was selling for $85 on Newegg, which is about $4 less than the competing 1TB Kingston DataTraveler Max and about $6 less than Transcend's 1TB ESD 310C, two of our previous picks for fast flash drives.

Tube T31 Specs

External Design

The packaging of the Tube T31 likens it to looks to be a cross between a vacuum tube and a light bulb. But in the hand, the drive's rounded edges and solid-feeling plastic shell remind me more of a nicely designed lighter or an external USB Wi-Fi dongle.

Sure, the drive's shell is somewhat plain, with matte-black plastic (save for the SK hynix logo and regulatory lettering on the back). But it also feels comfortable, familiar, and subtly quirky in a way that I like. Its rounded edges and 0.55-inch thickness means it also slides into pretty much any pocket without much effort.

In short, it's big for a flash drive, but small for an external SSD – especially when you consider that SSDs require carrying around a cable.

I'd love it if the exterior were metal instead of plastic, but years of using other drives tells me plastic often holds up better to minor bumps and scrapes. The company says the drive can survive falls of up to two meters (6 feet 7 inches).

The Tube T31 ships with nothing on the drive, and aside from a couple of slips of paper, there are no bundled accessories, unless you count the cap over the USB-A port. It attaches solidly, but isn't permanently attached, which means I'm surprised I haven't lost it already.

Inside the Tube T31

Getting inside the Tube T31 was fairly easy using a metal spudger tool along the seams of its shell. Popping off the plastic reveals a 42mm M.2 SSD. That's in between the small 30mm drives that make up the best SSDs for the Steam Deck and the 80mm drives that are more or less the standard size for desktops and laptops. It's a PCIe 3.0 drive (specifically, model HFM001TD3HX015N EA), paired with a JMicron JMS583 USB bridge controller, mounted on the opposite side of the PCB.

SK hynix has added cooling to both the drive and the controller (as well as some internal structural rigidity ), in the form of metal plates on each side, bridged with a small thermal pad. As we'll see in the next section, this design works quite well for performance, even if the PCIe x4 drive is held back by an x2 controller and the 10 Gbps USB-A interface.

Comparison Products

On Amazon, the SK hynix Tube T31 is frankly overpriced, at $99 for the 1TB model (and $79 for the 512GB version). But at Newegg, the 1TB T31 is $84.99, which undercuts both the 1TB Kingston DataTraveler Max and Transcend's 1TB ESD 310C slightly. Since those two competing drives were previous high-speed favorites of ours, it will be interesting to see how the T31 stacks up.

I expect the T31 to outperform the Buffalo SSD-PUT, as it's only rated to 600 MBps. The Buffalo drive has long been our favorite drive for most people, as it's often on sale for around $60-$65 for 1TB, and the 2TB model has occasionally sold for less than $100. But at the moment, the 1TB Buffalo drive is also priced at $89. At that price, there are better-performing options, as we'll soon see.

Trace Testing - PCMark 10 Storage Benchmark

PCMark 10 is a trace-based benchmark that uses a wide-ranging set of real-world traces from popular applications and everyday tasks to measure the performance of storage devices.

On this first test, the SK hynix Tube T31 lands in third place. It's a respectable showing, but slightly behind our two other flash drive speedsters.

Transfer Rates – DiskBench

We use the DiskBench storage benchmarking tool to test real-world file transfer performance with a custom 50GB dataset. We copy 4,617 files (images, videos, and software ISO files) to a folder on the test drive (write). Then, after leaving the system idle for five minutes, we run the same test in reverse, moving the test folder to a different location on our PCIe 4.0 testing drive.

Round two of our benchmarks sees the SK hynix drive rocket to the top in real-world read performance, about 135-142 MB/s faster than its closest competitors. And only Silicon Power's DS72 was faster on writes. This is a great showing for the SK hynix drive.

Synthetic Testing CrystalDiskMark

CrystalDiskMark (CDM) is a free and easy-to-run storage benchmarking tool that SSD companies commonly use to assign product performance specifications. It gives us insight into how each device handles different file sizes. We run this test at its default settings.

On this test, the Tube T31 lands on top in both sequential reads and writes, proving itself to be more than 100MB/s faster on writes and 81MB/s faster than the 1TB Kingston DataTraveler Max.

Here the 2TB Buffalo SSD-Put shows up near the top of our charts for the first time, but the SK hynix drive is just two MB/s behind it on reads and lands in third place on writes.

SK hynix also touts the Tube T31's "consistent performance, even when full." This sounds great, and indeed could be an important differentiator for some users. I filled the Tube T31 to roughly 90% of its capacity and, in both our DiskBench file transfer test and CrystalDiskMark, it performed roughly the same (within run-to-run variance) as it did when it was empty. But I did the same thing with the competing Transcend and Kingston drives, and those drives didn't slow down when nearly full, either. Buffalo's 2TB SSD-PUT did slow down in sequential speeds in the same scenario, but it was roughly 10-15%.

Conclusion

In some ways, it's a bit odd that SK hynix chose to pair a PCIe 3.0 x4 SSD with a x2 controller and a USB-A port that tops out at just 10 Gbps. Clearly, the internal drive is capable of faster speeds, as would be a USB-C port. But faster speeds likely would have required more complicated or robust cooling. And there's no denying that 10 Gbps USB-A ports are far more common than 20 Gbps (USB 3.2 Gen2 2x2) ports (and backward compatible with all slower USB-A ports). So perhaps the company was just aiming for compatibility and convenience over the best performance possible.

Regardless, the Tube T31 is the fastest USB-A "flash drive" or "SSD stick" we've tested to date. If you're looking for a portable drive and don't need 20 Gbps speeds or a capacity higher than 1TB, it's easy to recommend. Sure, its bulk might get in the way of nearby ports. But chances are, at least on a desktop, you have a few USB-A ports that aren't always populated.

MORE: Best SSDs

MORE: Best External SSDs

MORE: Best SSD for the Steam Deck

Adata's SD810 external SSD may sport modern 20Gbps (USB 3.2 Gen2 2x2) speeds, but its metal-wrapped and plastic-capped exterior design dates back to at least 2017. Still, it feels solid, offers IP68 water resistance (with its cap in place), and is almost as small as drives with more modern designs, like Crucial's X10 Pro, one of the best external SSDs you can buy. 

So we'll give Adata a pass on the SD810's dated design, especially considering its budget-friendly price for a 20Gbps drive. The drive is technically offered in capacities from 512GB up to 4TB, but when we wrote this, only the 1TB model ($89) and 2TB ($159) were readily available in the U.S. Crucial's 20Gbps X10 Pro sells for about $110 for 1TB, and $166 for the 2TB model. That gives the Adata drive an advantage on price, especially if you can find it on sale for a bit less. When we wrote this, Amazon was selling the 1TB SD810 that we tested for $85 and the 2TB model for $140.

So is the Adata SD810 a great lower-cost alternative in the niche (but certainly crowded) USB 3.2 Gen2 2x2 external SSD space, or should you spend your storage money on another drive? We'll have to put the SD810 through our benchmark testing to say for sure. But first, here are its specs, straight from Adata. 

Adata SD810 specs 

Design and Accessories for the Adata SD810

The fact that this drive's external design is at least seven years old undoubtedly helps the company keep costs down. And while I'm not a huge fan of the plastic / rubber port cover you'll want to keep in place when the drive is not in use for moisture resistance, the outer shell is a single, rigid piece of metal that feels more durable than some SSDs – the Silicon Power PX10, in particular, has a noticeably thinner metal shell. And while the SD81 isn't the smallest or thinnest of drives at 2.86 x 1.73 x 0.48 inches, it's smaller than many drives with more modern design. It slides easily into just about any pocket, and at 1.47 ounces, you're not going to notice its weight, either.

As for included accessories, you get a USB-C-to-USB-C cable that's fairly long (roughly 12 inches), and that's about it. The SD810 ships completely free of software (or any files), which to me is fine for a budget drive. And the drive's product page doesn't offer any downloads either, save for a data sheet and a quick start guide.

Comparison Products

Our external storage testbed is built around an ASRock Z790 Taichi Lite motherboard (recently upgraded from the MSI Z90 MEG ACE for better USB 4 support) and a Core i5-12600K CPU. This system gives us native Thunderbolt 4 ports and a USB 3.2 Gen 2 2x2 port via the front header (connected through Corsair's 5000D Airflow case).

In the charts below, we've included a Sabrent Rocket Nano XTRM Thunderbolt 3 drive ($170 for our 1TB), which has more bandwidth (40Gb/s) at its disposal than the other drives.

To see how other 20Gb/s USB drives compare, we've included Kingston's XS200 ($305 for the 4TB model we tested) and Crucial's X10 Pro ($166 for the 2TB model when we wrote this), and a trio of lower-end 10Gb/s USB drives: Samsung's T7 Shield ($159, 2TB), Kingston's SX1000 ($140, 2TB), and Crucial's X9 Pro ($149, 2TB). Lastly, for some perspective, we've also included one of the best flash drives we've tested, Kingston's DataTraveler Max (1TB, $92).

Trace Testing - PCMark 10 Storage Benchmark

PCMark 10 is a trace-based benchmark that uses a wide-ranging set of real-world traces from popular applications and everyday tasks to measure the performance of storage devices.

Adata's SD810 lands in a very impressive second place here among drives we've tested recently, behind the Sabrent Thunderbolt drive and ahead of LaCie's Rugged Mini ($120 for the 1TB model).

Transfer Rates – DiskBench

We use the DiskBench storage benchmarking tool to test real-world file transfer performance with a custom 50GB dataset. We copy 4,617 files (images, videos, and software ISO files) to a folder on the test drive (write). Then, after leaving the system idle for five minutes, we run the same test in reverse, moving the test folder to a different location on our PCIe 4.0 testing drive.

On this test, the LaCie drive swapped places with the Adata on reads, but the SD810 still looks good here, landing in third place in reads and writes.

Synthetic Testing CrystalDiskMark

CrystalDiskMark (CDM) is a free and easy-to-run storage benchmarking tool that SSD companies commonly use to assign product performance specifications. It gives us insight into how each device handles different file sizes. We run this test at its default settings.

Once again, the Adata SD810 looks impressive here in a comfortable third place, just behind the LaCie drive.

When it comes to small file performance, the 10Gbps Silicon Power drive jumps up to second place, pushing both the LaCie and Adata drives down one spot. Still, this is another solid showing for the SD810. But it's our next and final test that often shows the true limitations of external SSDs.

Sustained Write Performance

A drive's rated write specifications are only a piece of the performance picture. Most external SSDs (just like their internal counterparts) implement a write cache, or a fast area of flash, programmed to perform like faster SLC, that absorbs incoming data.

Sustained write speeds often suffer tremendously when the workload saturates the cache and slips into the "native" TLC or QLC flash. We use Iometer to hammer the SSD with sequential writes for 15 minutes to measure the size of the write cache and performance after the cache is saturated.

After landing in the top three or four in our other tests, it's a hard fall for the Adata SD810 drive in our sustained write test. After starting out speedily writing at just under 1,800MBps, it falls below, and then just above, 200MBps for the rest of our test (around 230MBps, more specifically). While Adata doesn't specify the type of flash it uses, it's pretty clear by those numbers that the SD810 uses QLC, with a fairly small SLC cache. It's possible that the 2TB model has a larger cache, and so would write in the 1,800MBps range longer, but if the cache is dynamic, it's also going to drop once the drive gets close to full.

So for those who often move large files or file libraries, you'd be much better off opting for a technically slower 10Gbps drive that can write at near its max speed for the duration than Adata's drive, which claims 20Gbps, but in these circumstances spends most of its time writing at about a tenth of that. For examples of good 10Gbps drives, see the Samsung T7 Shield and the Crucial X9 Pro in the chart above, or even our current budget champ, the Silicon Power PX10. The PX10 drops from its top speed after a similar amount of time as the Adata, but remains above 800MBps for the duration of our test, making it much faster at moving large libraries of data.

Conclusion

If all you do with your external SSD is occasionally load it up with 100GB or less of data here and there, Adata's SD810 drive should serve you well. But then so would most slower 10Gbps drives that cost about the same, like Silicon Power's PX10 or Crucial's X9 Pro. But if you're going to opt for a USB 3.2 Gen2 2x2 20Gbps drive and you want to take advantage of that speed (provided, of course, you have a suitably fast USB port), you're generally better off opting for a drive that can actually deliver those speeds for more than about a minute at a time.

For those who need performance in the 20Gbps range, Crucial's X10 Pro is a much better buy than Adata's SD810, even though it costs $15-$20 more (depending on capacity and current sale prices). It's not quite fair to say the SD810 is a 20Gbps drive in name only, but it's really only a 20Gbps drive in short bursts of about a minute. Then you'll need to let its SLC cache recover, or live with write speeds that are more in line with hard drives. And no one who's buying an SSD wants that.

MORE: Best SSDs

MORE: Best External SSDs

MORE: How We Test HDDs And SSDs

A portable SSD or hard drive is a device that can handle all kinds of storage tasks. It can house huge libraries of files (depending on capacity) and share them between PCs, Macs, tablets, and phones. The best external SSD can also contain full system backup files to restore your system's OS and software in the event of a crash, or it can let you run apps directly from the drive itself. But if you plan on doing the latter, an SSD is a much better choice than a comparatively slow and delicate external hard drive with a read / write head and spinning platters. For related reasons, external SSDs are also much faster than lower-priced external hard drives.

To help you choose the best external storage device 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 below. If you're looking for an internal hard drive for your PC or NAS, head to our list of best hard drives. We also have an expansive list of internal SSDs on our list of the best SSDs. Below, you'll find our list of the best external SSDs and HDDs we've tested.

Best Portable SSD

The SanDisk Pro-G40 is an excellent all-around portable SSD. It has both Thunderbolt 3 and USB modes, so it will work on a wide range of devices, although you may need a Type-C to Type-A adapter or cable. All-around performance is good. Its write performance is exceptional, and your experience in general should be consistently fast. The drive is built on somewhat dated hardware, but this is a mature platform that works excellently for a portable solution. The metal and rubberized casing is another bonusm as it keeps the drive cool while also protecting it against most environmental hazards.

The primary downside to the Pro-G40 is its price. If you don’t need the Thunderbolt functionality you have better options like the Samsung T7 Shield. You can also put together your own portable solution by buying an appropriate enclosure and drive. If you want high-end portability and performance in a rugged package, though, the Pro-G40 is the drive for you.

Read: SanDisk Pro-G40 SSD Review

Best External Hard Drive

If you’re on the hunt for a new external hard drive, WD’s My Passport is an excellent choice. With a solid track record, password protection, and capacities that recently got bumped up to 6TB, it’s prepared to store a lot -- if not all -- of your data and keep it safe.

As street prices have started to fall, it's become a better value than ever. It looks good and comes backed by a plentiful 3-year warranty. To top things off, it boasts top-notch AES 256-bit hardware encryption password protection to keep your content secure from prying eyes.

Read: WD My Passport 5TB Review

We also recently reviewed the 6TB version of the WD My Passport drive. It's a bit thicker and heavier than the 5TB version but otherwise seems to perform about the same. If you need more capacity than lesser models, it's a fine option. But note that there's a $50 price increase for the extra terabyte of capacity, so you'll probably want to ask yourself if you really need that extra space before buying.

Read: WD My Passport 6TB Review

Best USB4 SSD

In the USB4 realm, which is much more widespread than faster Thunderbolt 5, Corsair’s EX400U strikes a great balance between performance and price. Our sequential testing shows it's capable of read speeds above 4,000 MBps, and read speeds over 3,700 MBps. And our sustained Iometer testing showed the drive maintaing a write speed typically between 1,600 and 1,700 MBps for 15 minutes. So it doesn't drastically slow down after its cache has been depleted.

The EX400U certainly isn't cheap at around $189 for the 2TB model we tested, or $349 for the 4TB model. But it's downright affordable compared to the LaCie's Rugged SSD Pro5 Thunderbolt 5 drive, which was selling for $329 for the 2TB model and $529 for the 4TB model when we wrote this. The Corsair SSD also has a magnet on the back that lets it snap onto modern iPhones and some Android phones, making it handy for recording high-res video.

The Corsair drive also ships in a 1TB flavor (around $119), which the LaCie drive lacks. Given Corsair’s drive is much faster and more future-proof than top 20Gbps drives like the Crucial X10 Pro, it makes those older drives hard to argue for, since they still often sell for around the same price as the faster EX400U.

Read: Corsair EX400U (2TB) review

Best SSD for Travel

Sharge Disk Pro may be the most interesting, innovative, and genuinely useful 10 Gbps drives I've ever tested. It's built-in USB / HDMI hub makes it great for travel or on-the-go work (just make sure you carry a USB-C port with a slim connector). And its performance is close enough to the best in its class that you wouldn't notice the difference outside of benchmarks.

For professional tasks, Scharge’s drive also delivered excellent sustained writes, possibly aided by its active cooling, sticking above the 900 MB/s mark for the full 30 minutes of our Iometer benchmark testing. If you need a drive that won’t slow down during massive file transfers or write-heavy workloads, this is one of the best 10 Gbps options I’ve tested. Then there's the magnetic back, which can make using it with compatible phones much more convenient.

Of all the drives I've tested in recent years, if I didn't need anything faster than 10 Gbps, this is the drive I would reach for when traveling. Because my laptop doesn't have enough ports, I don’t have to worry about it slowing down when dumping terabytes of photos, video, or other files onto the drive.

Read: Sharge Disk Pro 2TB review

Best Fast Cross-Platform SSD

LaCie’s Rugged SSD4 occupies an interesting niche. For Windows (and presumably Android) users with USB4, Corsair’s EX400U is nearly as fast in many of our tests, while costing less. And for Mac purists who have the latest hardware, LaCie’s Rugged SSD Pro5 is significantly faster if you have machines with a Thunderbolt 5 port.

But for creators and enthusiasts with production workflows or portable file needs that span multiple platforms, the LaCie Rugged SSD4 delivers the fastest performance we’ve seen across Windows and Macs. We saw sequential speeds around 4,000 MB/s reads and 3,700 MB/s writes in Windows 11, and somewhat slower but still fast reads on a current-gen Mac Min of 3,440 MB/s reads and 3,093 MB/s writes. Add in the three years of included data recovery, and the Rugged SSD4 is easy to recommend for those who need speed and peace of mind while working in Windows, macOS, and maybe Android and iOS as well (though we didn’t test the drive on the latter two platforms).

Read: LaCie Rugged SSD4 4TB Review

Best Rugged Portable Hard Drive

While it is on the pricey side, LaCie’s Rugged RAID Pro isn’t too overpriced considering its market placement and the peace of mind of data redundancy. LaCie includes one month of all Adobe apps for free, a $79.49 (£61) value. More importantly, the drive comes with three years of free data recovery protection. That service can (at times) cost thousands of dollars.

If you are a creative professional in the market for an external HDD, be sure to check this drive out. There aren't many competitors: Most other HDD solutions are much larger, and flash-based SSDs don’t yet offer similarly-priced capacity, nor the same value-adds. The LaCie Rugged RAID Pro 4TB has a unique blend of features and accessories that make it easy to use and quite the versatile travel companion.

Read: Lacie Rugged RAID Pro Review

Most Conveniently Secure Portable SSD

Samsung’s T7 Touch is an innovative portable SSD that blends USB 3.2 Gen 2 performance with convenient AES 256-bit hardware security that’s unlocked by the touch of your fingertip. The built-in fingerprint scanner is the most convenient way to unlock your data that we’ve seen yet. The design is elegant and to a higher standard than your ordinary run-of-the-mill portable drive. The aluminum construction is solid, and various color options are available to suit your unique taste.

That said, G-Technology's recent ArmorLock drive gives Samsung a run for its secure storage money, by using an app and key that's stored on your Android or iOS phone to unlock your drive. It may not be as convenient as swiping your finger across a sensor on your external SSD, but it might just be more secure.

Read: Samsung T7 Touch Portable SSD Review

Best Thunderbolt 5 Portable SSD

The LaCie Rugged SSD Pro 5 combines a tried-and-true rugged design with by far the fastest single-drive speeds we’ve ever seen on an external SSD, when tested on a Thunderbolt 5-equipped Mac.It also ships with five years of Seagate's data recovery service, making it easy to recommend for Mac users – particularly those who only or primarily use current-gen Mac hardware and need the fastest possible performance for media creation or other write-heavy purposes.

Just note that its support on older hardware is so complex that it requires its own compatibility page, and in our testing in Windows 11 over a USB4 / Thunderbolt 4 port, it was slower than recent native USB4 drives. So at least until Thunerbolt 5 becomes more widespread on Macs and PCs, this isn't the best drive for workflows that include Windows PCs.

Read: LaCieRugged SSD Pro5 review

Best Thunderbolt 3 Portable SSD

Driven by an OEM variant of a Samsung 970 EVO and an Alpine Ridge Thunderbolt 3-to-PCIe bridge, Samsung’s X5 is the fastest Thunderbolt 3 portable SSD we’ve tested. Not only will it help speed up your workflow, but it also comes with an additional layer of AES 256-bit hardware-based encryption and password protection for those who need to meet compliance requirements. The three-year warranty is lacking for the professional crowd, and we wish the company offered more color options like those found with the company’s T5 and T7 portable SSDs.

Read: Samsung X5 Portable SSD Review

Drives that didn't make the list

Of course, not every drive we test is the best. But prices change and not everyone has the same storage needs. So if one of these drives goes on a good sale and you like how it performs, it might be worth considering.

We've classified the SK hynix Tube T31 as a flash drive, or SSD stick, since it has a familiar flash drive form factor. But inside, it's actually an m.2 SSD on a small PCB. It's fast by flash drive standards, sports a USB-A port that tops out at 10Gbps, and is only available at 512GB and 1TB capacities. But if those limitations sound good to you, it's well worth considering. It's also on our list of the best flash drives.

Adata's SD810 is a far more traditional external SSD, and one that's surprisingly affordable for a 20Gbps drive. It's great for bursty tasks like moving a few GB of files or perhaps running some light programs. But our testing showed that under sustained speedy writes, its cache can quickly run out, and the drive then writes at hard-drive speeds until the cache can recover. That won't be a problem for everyone. But if you're going to buy a 20Gbps drive, you should probably consider one that can better maintain that speed.

How We Test External SSDs 

Our current testbed consists of an ASRock Z790 Taichi Lite motherboard and a Core i5-12600K CPU. This system gives us native Thunderbolt 4 ports and a USB 3.2 Gen 2 2x2 port via the front header (connected through Corsair's 5000D Airflow case).

We run several tests on the external drives we test, with a mixture of real-world and synthetic benchmarks, and both sequential and small file (4K) reads and writes.

▶️ Trace Testing: PCMark 10 Storage Benchmark

PCMark 10 is a trace-based benchmark that uses a wide-ranging set of real-world traces from popular applications and everyday tasks to measure the performance of storage devices. We report both the proprietary overall score, as well as the bandwidth measured during the test.

▶️ Transfer Rates: DiskBench

We use the DiskBench storage benchmarking tool to test real-world file transfer performance with a custom 50GB dataset. We copy 4,617 files (images, videos, and software ISO files) to a folder on the test drive (write). Then, after leaving the system idle for five minutes, we run the same test in reverse, moving the test folder to a different location on our PCIe 4.0 testing drive. This is a separate drive from our boot drive, to avoid slowdowns due to the operating system background tasks that can be difficult to control for.

▶️ Synthetic Testing: CrystalDiskMark

CrystalDiskMark (CDM) is a free and easy-to-run storage benchmarking tool that SSD companies commonly use to assign product performance specifications. It gives us insight into how each device handles different file sizes. We run this test at its default settings.

The sequential read and write test effectively amounts to a best-case scenario, which often closely aligns with the read /write specs that drive makers put in their specs and on the product box.

The 4K read / write test, meanwhile, is more of a measure of how well the drive handles a plethora of small files, the kind of workload you might encounter when running a program, an OS, or a game directly from the drive.

▶️ Sustained Write Performance: Iometer

A drive's rated write specifications are only a piece of the performance picture. Most external SSDs (just like their internal counterparts) implement a write cache, or a fast area of flash, programmed to perform like faster SLC, that absorbs incoming data.

Sustained write speeds often suffer tremendously when the workload saturates the cache and slips into the "native" TLC or QLC flash. We use Iometer to hammer the SSD with sequential writes for 15 minutes to measure the size of the write cache and performance after the cache is saturated.

This test in particular tends to separate so-called "professional" drives from the rest. Those who often dump massive file libraries onto their external drives, often filling entire drives up in one go, need fast sustained write speeds. More casual storage users, on the other hand, are more likely to write smaller files or libraries of 100GB or less. These kinds of users can still benefit from fast sustained writes, but it may not be as necessary if you rarely or never write enough data to your drive at once from a fast enough source to burn through an SSD's fast SLC cache.

Also tested

Not every drive we test lands on our best external SSD list, but that doesn't mean these alternative drives aren't worth consideration. We recently tested Team Group's PD20, a 20Gbps drive that's available in capacities up to 4TB.

It's an attractive drive with a silver (plastic) and black rubber shell, but its performance in our testing didn't stand out against the competition, particularly when it comes to sustained writes. The drive still performs well enough in most mainstream tasks that many will find its performance just fine. If you like the way it looks, it's worth considering, especially if you can find it on sale.

You can also make your own external SSD

Note that, if you have a spare drive, you can easily make your own portable drive. Dozens of 2.5-inch drive enclosures can be found online for between $10-$25 (£15-25) that will let you drop in an old drive easily, and turn it into an external hard drive or SSD.

And if you have an M.2 drive that you've swapped out of a gaming laptop, ultrabook or upgraded away from in your gaming PC, we've recently looked at NVMe enclosures from MyDigitalSSD and Pluggable. If you have a SATA-based M.2 drive that you'd like to turn into a portable drive, Silverstone's MS09 enclosure lets you do just that. And if you're keen on building your own speedy external SSD but don't have a drive handy to use, the recent WD Blue SN550 is a good candidate for that task. It's only available in capacities up to 1TB, but it's plenty speedy for external storage, and the more spacious model is already selling for as little as $115 at various online outlets.

Just make sure you get an enclosure that matches your drive, be that SATA or NVMe. And also keep in mind that DIY external drives usually aren't sealed, so they're not as likely to stand up to dust and dampness as well as external SSDs and portable hard drives that are designed to do so.

Best External SSD FAQs

When shopping for an external drive or SSD, consider the following:

Finding Discounts on the Best External Storage Drives

Whether you're shopping for one of the best external storage drives or one that didn't quite make our list, you may find savings by checking out the latest Crucial promo codes, Newegg promo codes, Amazon promo codes, Corsair coupon codes, Samsung promo codes or Micro Center coupons.

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Silicon Power might not be the biggest name in storage, but the Taiwanese company regularly churns out impressive products, particularly at the value end of the spectrum. And its latest external SSD, the PX10, looks to continue that legacy. The aluminum-wrapped USB 3.2 Gen2 (10Gbps) drive is available in 1TB (the model we tested), 2TB, and 4TB capacities and starts at just $79.99 – that's $15-20 cheaper than Crucial's 1TB X9 Pro or Samsung's T7 Shield, and in many of our tests (pretty much all of them, save for the heavy hitting 15-minute Iometer test) it's faster than those drives.

It's also very thin and narrow, doing little to hide the M.2 SSD that's obviously hiding under its shell. But that also makes it easy to slide into your pocket. It also ships with a premium foot-long braided USB-C cable that the company also rates to 60W of charging – should you want to use it for things other than plugging in your external storage.

The Silicon Power PX10 isn't ground-breaking in any particular way. But its performance is surprisingly swift for 10Gbps-class drives, and its price is appealing. About the only obvious absence here is that Silicon Power makes no mention of AES encryption. Also, while the PX10's sustained performance was very good in our tests, hovering mostly around 850MB/s, the above-mentioned Samsung and Crucial drives stick closer to 1,000MBps. This, plus the brand cachet of those more well-known companies, will be worth spending a little extra for. But for general consumers looking for a budget-priced drive with few sacrifices, Silicon Power's PX10 is an enticing option.

Specifications

Design and Accessories for the Silicon Power PX10

Silicon Power's PX10 looks like an M.2 SSD housed in a slim aluminum enclosure – and that's almost certainly what it is. The drive is quite thin, with bulges around the controller and NAND package areas that take the drive up to 0.41 inches thick. Its 4.07-inch length and 1.3-inch width also mimic the dimensions of an internal M.2 SSD, albeit with some added space for USB circuitry and the enclosure itself.

All that said, the drive is extremely pocketable, just slightly thicker than Crucial's X10 Pro (0.39 inches), as well as being much narrower but about 1.5 inches longer. It also feels solid and premium thanks to its metal shell. This means it also gets quite warm to the touch under heavy loads. But in our experience, even when running our 15-minute-plus Iometer test, it didn't get too hot to hold.

There's little in the way of included accessories: You just get a single included USB-C-to-USB-C cable, which is 12 inches long and nicely braided. While it, like the drive, is only rated to USB 3.2 Gen 2 (10Gbps) speed, the company says the cable can handle up to 60W of power delivery. This is a nice bonus because the cable is premium enough that you may want to use it for purposes other than this drive.

Software of the Silicon Power PX10

Silicon Power doesn't ship the drive with any local software, but instead hosts links to drive registration, a satisfaction survey, and a link to the company's downloads page, where you can pick up the SP Toolbox.

Its design is decidedly dated, but it covers some basics, like checking drive health, temperature, and bytes written. I often don't install this kind of software unless or until something seems wrong, so I don't have a problem with what Silicon Power provides here. But there's no doubt that the drive software offerings from companies like Samsung, Crucial, and WD are much better designed and offer more features.

Comparison Products

We've recently set up a new storage testbed, built around an MSI Z90 MEG ACE motherboard and a Core i5-12600K CPU. This system gives us native Thunderbolt 4 ports and a USB 3.2 Gen 2 2x2 port via the front header (connected through Corsair's 5000D Airflow case).

As our test rig is still fairly new, we have limited comparisons that will quickly grow as we test and review more drives. In the charts below, we've included a Sabrent Rocket Nano XTRM Thunderbolt 3 drive ($170 for our 1TB), which has more bandwidth (40Gb/s) at its disposal than the other drives. 

To see how higher-end 20Gb/s USB drives compare, we've included Kingston's XS200 ($305 for the 4TB model we tested) and Crucial's X10 Pro ($179 when we wrote this), and a trio of lower-end 10Gb/s USB drives: Samsung's T7 Shield ($159, 2TB), Kingston's SX1000 ($1068, 2TB), and Crucial's X9 Pro ($125, 2TB). Lastly, for some perspective, we've also included one of the best flash drives we've tested, Kingston's DataTraveler Max (1TB, $93).

Crucial's X9 Pro will offer up the stiffest competition to Silicon Power's PX10 drive, as it's also rated to 1050MB/s reads and writes, and sells for $95 for the 1TB model (we tested the 2TB). Silicon Power's drive is cheaper though, at just $80 for the 1TB model we tested. And as we'll soon see in our testing, the SP drive often lands ahead of the Crucial X9 Pro.

Trace Testing - PCMark 10 Storage Benchmark

PCMark 10 is a trace-based benchmark that uses a wide-ranging set of real-world traces from popular applications and everyday tasks to measure the performance of storage devices.

Among the drives we've run through our new testbed, the higher-bandwidth Sabrent, LaCie, and Crucial X10 Pro drives take the lead. But Silicon Power's PX10 lands in a respectable fourth place here, ahead of the somewhat more expensive Crucial X9 Pro.

Transfer Rates – DiskBench

We use the DiskBench storage benchmarking tool to test real-world file transfer performance with a custom 50GB dataset. We copy 4,617 files (images, videos, and software ISO files) to a folder on the test drive (write). Then, after leaving the system idle for five minutes, we run the same test in reverse, moving the test folder to a different location on our PCIe 4.0 testing drive.

Once again, the Silicon Power drive lands ahead of the Crucial X9 Pro here, as well as Kingston's DataTraveler Max, on this large real-world test of reads and writes.

Synthetic Testing CrystalDiskMark

CrystalDiskMark (CDM) is a free and easy-to-run storage benchmarking tool that SSD companies commonly use to assign product performance specifications. It gives us insight into how each device handles different file sizes. We run this test at its default settings.

On this sequential test, the Silicon Power PX10 again does well, beating out all the drives with 10Gbps of bandwidth. It also beats its rated 1050 MB/s read speed slightly and gets within about 15 MB/s of that speed on writes.

When it comes to IOPS, Silicon Power's drive looks even more impressive, landing in second place in random reads and first place in writes. It doesn't quite blow away the competition, but for what amounts to a budget drive, this is a surprisingly good showing.

Sustained Write Performance

A drive's rated write specifications are only a piece of the performance picture. Most external SSDs (just like their internal counterparts) implement a write cache, or a fast area of flash, programmed to perform like faster SLC, that absorbs incoming data.

Sustained write speeds often suffer tremendously when the workload saturates the cache and slips into the "native" TLC or QLC flash. We use Iometer to hammer the SSD with sequential writes for 15 minutes to measure the size of the write cache and performance after the cache is saturated.

In this, the most grueling of our storage benchmarks, Silicon Power's slim drive was a solid performer, but not quite as impressive against its direct competition. It started out writing around the 1000MB/s mark, but dropped to the mid 800s after about exactly a minute, and stayed there throughout our 15-minute test and beyond. That's not a massive drop and the performance was very consistent.

But both the Crucial X9 Pro and Samsung's T7 Shield stuck closer to either side of the 1000MB/s line in the same test. That's not a huge difference in terms of percentages, but when writing large file libraries that take several minutes to complete, you'll definitely notice the extra sustained speed of Silicon Power's competitors.

Test Bench and Testing Notes

We use an Intel Alder Lake platform, with most background applications such as indexing, windows updates, and anti-virus disabled in the OS to reduce run-to-run variability.

Conclusion

Silicon Power's PX10 external SSD isn't the fastest drive in every metric, even among its 10 Gbps rivals. But it does land at or near the top on many of our benchmark tests, which is a pleasing surprise given the drive's low asking price, starting at $79 for the 1TB model and just $213 for the 4TB option. Professional users who want the maximum sustained write speeds for dumping and moving massive file libraries should probably pay the $15-$30 extra for Crucial's X9 Pro, which was about 150MB/s faster in our Iometer testing.

But for those looking for a fast, slim drive at a nice price, Silicon Power's PX10 is well worth considering. Just remember that its slim aluminum frame means that it can get quite warm during prolonged use. So maybe leave it dangling from its braided cable when using it, so it can benefit from whatever airflow is available around your PC.

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Lexar unveiled new portable SSDs at CES 2024 — the SL500, Professional SL600, and the SL660 Blaze — with up to 2,000 MB/s read & write speeds. All three portable SSDs are purpose-built and have multiple storage variants.

The SL500 and the Armor 700 for video recording

The SL500 Ultra Slim delivers up to 2,000 MB/s read and 1,800 write transfer speeds with 1TB, 2TB, and 4TB options. This drive is useful for devices like the iPhone 15 Pro, which uses the ProRes RAW format for videos. Apple allows recording to an external drive, making portable SSDs like the SL500 perfect for this application. A MagSafe add-on, which will be sold separately, can help the drive stay where it needs to be. 

The Armor 700 is the new iteration of the Lexar Armor series drives. As the name suggests, the Armor 700 has a rugged design for added durability. It has an IP66 rating (the IP65 labeling on Lexar's presentation isn't up to date) that's not seen with any other rugged drives, providing a higher level of protection against dust, liquid, and drops. This drive is advertised to provide up to 2,000 MBs in both read and write speeds, giving plenty of throughput ability to use as an external source to record 4K 60fps videos from any device. This resolution and refresh rate in RAW format consumes a lot of space and requires high write speeds. Since iPhones don't have MicroSD expandability, high-performing portable SSDs fill the gap. 

The Lexar SL500 and the Armor 700 use Silicon Motion's controller with a USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 interface.

The SL600 for the masses and the SL660 Blaze for gaming

The Professional SL600 is a USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 drive with 256-bit AES encryption and no RGB. It is available in 1TB, 2TB, and 4TB. 

The SL660 Blaze has 512GB and 1TB storage variants with RGB LEDs aimed at gamers. External storage is just as important for various other types of users as many handheld gaming devices do not have provisions to use a MicroSD card. 

Pricing is not confirmed, but the drives will be available at retail during Q1 2024. Some of these portable SSDs are already listed on Lexar's website, so it is just a matter of time before its release. 

At CES 2024, Patriot showcased its storage devices ready for 2024, starting with its next-generation PCIe 5.0 NVMe SSDs. However, the company also showed several new external storage drives for 2024, including the portable SSD USB Duo A/C and an interesting prototype called the Portable SSD USB 4.0. 

The Portable SSD USB 4 prototype is still a work in progress as there's no casing on it, though Patriot plans to release this drive in 2024. It will use a Realtek 5772DL controller paired with an ASMedia ASM2464 bridge controller and WD BiCS5 NAND chips. This portable USB 4 SSD will be available in 1TB, 2TB, and 4TB capacities and is advertised to yield sequential reads up to 3,720 MB/s and writes up to 3,720 MB/s. 

Patriot also prepared two other external drives. Being true to its name, the Portable SSD Duo A/C features Type-C and Type-A ports in its casing. The company promises this drive will provide read and write speeds up to 1,000 MB/s and will be available in 512GB, 1TB, and 2TB storage capacities. 

The Portable SSD was also marked as a prototype, featuring only a Type-C port and a much higher transfer data speed. In its display, Patriot mentions it provides up to 2,100 MB/s reads and writes up to 1,800 MB/s. It is clear these drives are made for two different user bases- one provides versatile physical compatibility and the other with more performance throughput.

Patriot also provides a Type-C to dual Type A/C cable for the drives, which looks similar to the cable that comes with the Transporter external SSD.

The State of USB 4 External SSDs

We already have PCs and Macs that leverage USB 4, so it is about time we see more manufacturers roll out USB 4 SSD and NVMe enclosures. We tested the ZikeDrive USB 4 enclosure for NVMe SSDs, which provides roughly the same speeds, and there are native USB 4 drives like the Adata SE920.

Portable drives are in high demand due to the need to have mass storage for mobile and handheld devices. This is where the products like the SSD Duo A/C and the Portable SSD fill the void. Unfortunately, pricing and retail availability were not provided by Patriot at CES. Hopefully, we'll learn these details in the coming months as these prototypes give way to production-ready designs. 

LaCie's Rugged external storage lineup is inarguably iconic, thanks to its instantly recognizable Neil Poulton design, and the company's commitment to those puffy orange rubber bumpers since 2005. The company is doubling down on its flotation-device styling, just shrinking it a bit with its latest Rugged Mini SSD.

Available in 500GB, 1TB, 2TB, and 4TB capacities, the Rugged Mini SSD sports a 20 GB/s USB 3.2 Gen2 2x2 interface, with a short removable USB-C cable, and ships with a three-year warranty that includes data recovery services (though not in all countries). It's also competitively priced for a LaCie drive ($190 for the 2TB model we tested) and proved to be quite fast – at least in most of our testing. 

But as we'll see in our Iometer testing, this drive writes very slowly if you manage to exhaust its fast SLC cache. For us, with an empty 2TB drive, that happened after about 600GB of sustained writes. So if you're the type of user who frequently dumps massive video files onto your external storage from a fast internal drive, you may want to look elsewhere – perhaps to Crucial's X10 Pro, one of the best external SSDs, which costs a little less and has much better sustained write speeds. 

Specifications

Design and Accessories for the LaCie Rugged Mini SSD

If you've seen a LaCie Rugged drive before, then the Rugged Mini SSD will instantly look familiar. It sports the same iconic orange rubber bumper and silver metal shell that the company's drives have been flaunting since 2005. On this model, though, the rubber cap for the USB-C port isn't permanently attached and feels like it would be easy to lose. 

The included USB-C-to-USB-C cable (also orange) is short at roughly six inches. As someone who is nearly drowning in all kinds of cables, though, I do appreciate the color and the fact that 20Gbps/240W is stamped into the rubber around the ports on either end. So there's no mistaking this is the cable you need for your speedy drive. I just wish it were a few inches longer.

The orange bumper adds extra bulk to what is already a fairly beefy drive by today's external SSD standards, at roughly 4.3 x 2.4 x 0.6 inches. By comparison, Crucial's X9 and X10 drives are 0.39 inches thick and 2.6 x 2 x 0.39. To be fair, both drives are fairly small if you're used to juggling external hard drives, but you could easily fit two or three smaller modern drives in the same space that LaCie's drive occupies.

You can take the bumper off pretty easily, which makes the drive somewhat smaller. But then you're almost certainly compromising the drive's IP54 dust and splash resistance. This also exposes the off-white plastic caps on each end of the drive that, along with the large white certifications sticker, severely marr the look of the otherwise one-piece silver metal frame. I don't love the orange-and-silver look of LaCie's Rugged drives. But this one looks miles better with its orange flotation jacket on.

Software of the LaCie Rugged Mini SSD

LaCie's drive ships with a warranty PDF and two links/launchers labeled Start_Here_Win and Start_Here_Mac.app. Clicking whichever one of those applies to your OS will eventually give you access to the company's Toolkit app, which is a simple but intuitive program for backing up specific folders or files, restoring those files, and mirroring specific folders. It also tells you how much space is left on the drive. 

Annoyingly, though, the links make you register first and try to get you to opt into nebulous "offers" from third parties. You can, at least, register without clicking the Optional Offers box.

You don't have to do any of this to get the company's Toolkit app, as a Google search pointed me to a direct download link. You do, though, have to register to get the included month of free access to all of Adobe's Creative Cloud apps.

LaCie also offers three years of "Rescue Data Recovery Services" with the drive which, if you need it, becomes pretty much the best feature possible. This is easily the best reason to register your drive. But check the fine print if you don't live in the United States because, just like with the free month of Adobe access, the offer isn't available in all countries. At the time of writing, the company hadn't provided a full list of countries where these extras do or don't apply.

Comparison Products

e recently set up a new storage testbed, built around an MSI Z90 MEG ACE motherboard and a Core i5-12600K CPU. This system gives us native Thunderbolt 4 ports and a USB 3.2 Gen 2 2x2 port via the front header (connected through Corsair's 5000D Airflow case).

As our test rig is still fairly new, we have limited comparisons that will quickly grow as we test and review more drives. In the charts below, we've included a Sabrent Rocket Nano XTRM Thunderbolt 3 drive ($170 for our 1TB), which has more bandwidth (40Gb/s) at its disposal than the other drives. 

To see how other 20Gb/s USB drives compare, we've included Kingston's XS200 ($305 for the 4TB model we tested) and Crucial's X10 Pro ($157 when we wrote this), and a trio of lower-end 10Gb/s USB drives: Samsung's T7 Shield ($180, 2TB), Kingston's SX1000 ($108, 2TB), and Crucial's X9 Pro ($125, 2TB). Lastly, for some perspective, we've also included one of the best flash drives we've tested, Kingston's DataTraveler Max (1TB, $93).

LaCie doesn't offer up any details about the type of flash or controller used for its drive, nor information about possible SLC caching. But as we'll see in the charts below, the drive does very well in our shorter or more bursty tests, before falling down hard on our Iometer benchmark, after writing nearly 600GB at top speed.

Trace Testing - PCMark 10 Storage Benchmark

PCMark 10 is a trace-based benchmark that uses a wide-ranging set of real-world traces from popular applications and everyday tasks to measure the performance of storage devices.

Among the drives we've run through our new testbed, the LaCie Rugged Mini lands in an impressive second place here, slightly ahead of Crucial's X10 Pro and behind Sabrent's XTRM, with its speedier interface. And – spoilers – that's mostly where the LaCie drive will stay in most of our benchmarks.

Transfer Rates – DiskBench

We use the DiskBench storage benchmarking tool to test real-world file transfer performance with a custom 50GB dataset. We copy 4,617 files (images, videos, and software ISO files) to a folder on the test drive (write). Then, after leaving the system idle for five minutes, we run the same test in reverse, moving the test folder to a different location on our PCIe 4.0 testing drive.

Here, once again, the LaCie drive lands in second place, at least when it comes to sustained reads. Sabrent's drive can't really compete when it comes to writes, but both the Crucial X10 and Kingston's XS200 are faster than the LaCie drive there. But LaCie's showing of 621 MB/s on that part of the test is still a solid third place.

Synthetic Testing CrystalDiskMark

CrystalDiskMark (CDM) is a free and easy-to-run storage benchmarking tool that SSD companies commonly use to assign product performance specifications. It gives us insight into how each device handles different file sizes. We run this test at its default settings.

On this sequential test, the LaCie Rugged Mini SSD perhaps looks its best, landing in first place when it comes to writes (though Crucial's X10 isn't far behind), and scoring an impressive second-place showing in reads. Its 2015 MB/s result makes it the first Gen2 2x2 drive we've tested that breaks the 2 GB/s barrier. Again, though, the Crucial X10 Pro is hot on its heels and much smaller and a little cheaper.

When it comes to IOPS, the LaCie drive once again lands in second place behind Sabrent's Thunderbolt drive on reads. On writes, it's the best we've tested, though several drives here aren't far behind, including the much cheaper Crucial X9 Pro.

Sustained Write Performance

A drive's rated write specifications are only a piece of the performance picture. Most external SSDs (just like their internal counterparts) implement a write cache, or a fast area of flash, programmed to perform like faster SLC, that absorbs incoming data. 

Sustained write speeds often suffer tremendously when the workload saturates the cache and slips into the "native" TLC or QLC flash. We use Iometer to hammer the SSD with sequential writes for 15 minutes to measure the size of the write cache and performance after the cache is saturated.

In this, the most grueling of our storage benchmarks, the LaCie Rugged Mini SSD reveals its limitations. For more than five minutes, the LaCie drive wrote at a fairly steady state of around 1775 MB/s, or a bit less than 600 gigabytes of data. That's more and longer sustained high-speed writes than the 4TB Kingston, and over three times the showing of the Sabrent Thunderbolt drive (which also wrote roughly 1 GB/s slower). 

But it's clear the LaCie drive has some kind of SLC cache, and is likely using QLC flash, as the drive dropped to a slow write speed of just over 200MB/s after about 5 minutes and 40 seconds. Despite requests, company representatives wouldn't tell us anything about the internal specs of the Rugged Mini SSD.

Comparatively, the Crucial X10 Pro, while it writes just a little slower, was able to maintain a write speed above 1760 MB/s for over 10 minutes, and even then it only dropped to a write speed of about 1400 MB/s for the remainder of our test. Note also that the Crucial X9 Pro and Samsung T7 Shield, while slower drives in terms of their 10 GB/s interface, were able to maintain a fairly stable write speed of around 1,000 MB/s for the full 15-minute duration of our test.

While not everyone needs this level of sustained write performance, it's generally considered the bar for a true pro-level drive. And while LaCie's Rugged Mini SSD can write faster than most other drives for well over five minutes, a cheaper, technically slower drive may be a better choice if you're often writing massive videos or other data that approaches or surpasses 600 GB to your drive. Because if there's a lot of data left to be written once you surpass that mark and the drive tanks to about 200 MB/s, you're going to be waiting a very long time for the rest of that data to write to your drive.

Test Bench and Testing Notes

We use an Intel Alder Lake platform, with most background applications such as indexing, windows updates, and anti-virus disabled in the OS to reduce run-to-run variability.

Conclusion

 LaCie's Rugged Mini SSD sports an iconic design, is competitively priced, and on many of our tests, it's the fastest 20Gb/s drive we've tested. For those who aren't often writing massive files or libraries to their external SSD, it's a fine choice – although it's bigger than most current-gen alternatives.

The real caveat is for professional and prosumer users (the type that LaCie typically targets with this line) who frequently offload terabytes of files to free up their speedy internal storage, or to transport raw footage from one system to another. In our testing, after writing less than 600GB of files at nearly 1800 MB/s, LaCie's drive dropped to about 200 MB/s, which is no faster than a typical hard drive. Not everyone will hit those speeds often with their typical workloads. But if you do, you're better off looking elsewhere unless you put the included three years of data recovery service well ahead of sustained write speed.

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