There's always been a place for portable external storage solutions, from bringing extra space while traveling with your laptop to just transferring data between machines reliably without the need for a connected network. The choice between a flash drive, HDD, or SSD depends on several factors: speed, size, and, importantly, price!
Down to its lowest-ever price (according to the Camelizer plugin) Crucial's 2TB X9 portable SSD is now on sale for just $99. That's a good amount of speedy storage for the price, and with an SSD you're getting a much faster transfer rate than what you would expect with both a flash drive and an external HDD. The Crucial X9 has speeds up to 1,050MB/s, which isn't setting any records for speed compared to an external SSD like Samsung's 990 Pro, but it's one of the quicker external SSD drives. You could go for the speedier Crucial X10 2TB portable SSD for $159 with rapid transfer speeds of up to 2100MB/s, but bear in mind that the price also jumps up.
You can use this drive to store a fair amount of data with 2TB able to host even the largest of the latest AAA games - this can be a useful workaround if your gaming laptop has a tiny SSD, it's not ideal, but it works. Using a USB 3.2 Gen2 connection and coming with a USB Type-C to C cable, the Crucial X9 can make the most of the transfer speeds, but if your device doesn't have a USB-C port, you will need to use a different cable or adapter to change the USB-C to USB-A, this could affect your transfer speeds depending on your device.
This drive is portable and contained in a rugged enclosure that helps to protect the delicate SSD inside. Crucial has advertised this drive as being drop-proof up to 7.5 feet, and able to negate extreme temperature, shocks, and vibrations, but it's always best to try and avoid these situations if possible as SSDs are delicate.
