Best External SSDs 2026

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.

Matt Safford

I started testing SSDs at Computer Shopper during the heyday of OCZ and Intel SATA drives, the early to mid-2010s (although Samsung was tough to beat, even back then). I continued on the solid-state storage beat through the transition to M.2, as it first stuck with SATA, then moved to PCIe, and finally NVMe PCIe. While others have handled internal storage testing here at Tom's Hardware, I've kept up with storage advances by overseeing external storage and flash drive testing, among many other tasks.

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

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

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.

Team Group's PD20 is 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.

How We Test External SSDs 

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.

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 onboard fast cache. We also updated to CrystalDiskMark 8, rather than the older (and non-comparable) version 7 we used on the previous testbed.

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.

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. Although fafter 20, 40, or 80 Gbps enclosures cost significantly more.

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 tested several DIY options to determine the Best SSD and Hard Drive Enclosures that let you drop in a drive you already own, turning an old upgrade drive into speedy portable storage.

Just make sure you get an enclosure that matches your drive, be that SATA or NVMe. Also keep in mind that DIY external drives usually aren't sealed, so they're as good at standing 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.

MORE: Best SSDs

MORE: Best Hard Drive

MORE: How We Test HDDs And SSDs

MORE: All SSD Content