The all-aluminum chassis has ridges to help with heat dissipation and it comes with both a thermal pad you can put on top of your SSD to keep it cool under prolonged loads. It’s a rather attractive silver enclosure that has a small cutout / handle area you can use for threading through a carabiner. Many SSDs come with cables for both kinds (Type-A and Type-C) at the computer end, or one cable plus an adapter. Two full cables is generally best, as adapters can be awkward and easy to lose. You'll want to match what comes in the box with the ports your PC has (and has free). Also, match specs; spending extra, for example, for a 10Gbps USB 3.2 Gen 2 SSD if you only have 5Gbps-capable ports may be pointless. SATA-based drives tend to be a little cheaper; they're also slower, but just fine for most users' everyday applications. SATA-based SSDs typically top out at around 500MBps for peak read and write speeds, just a bit below the ceiling of the USB 3.0 interface. (Much more about that in a moment.) However, if you're going to be transferring large files such as videos often, you may well want to spring for a PCIe/NVMe-based external SSD. That also ties in with the port you'll plug your SSD into. (Credit: Zlata Ivleva) CARRY WEIGHT. Most SSDs weigh a negligible couple of ounces. The carabiner retention loop of SanDisk's Extreme family of external SSDs is especially handy, because many SSDs are small and light enough that losing them is an easy and expensive mistake.

External solid-state drives are, essentially, internal SSDs (the same kind that power laptops or live inside desktops) with an outer shell and some bridging electronics. As a result, external drives use one of two internal "bus types" that, in part, dictate their peak speed: Serial ATA (SATA), or PCI Express (PCIe). The latter is usually associated these days with Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe), a protocol that is optimized for the characteristics of SSDs and speeds up data transfers. This is one of the most performant 10 Gbps enclosures and one of the most convenient, thanks to a tool-free design that allows you to slip the cover off by pressing a spring-loaded switch. It's a few dollars more than the Sabrent EC-SNVE at present and we prefer that enclosure's flip-up lid to the Plugble's slide-out one.

Arguably more important than the type of storage mechanism inside an external SSD is how it connects to your PC or Mac. Almost all external SSDs today plug into either some flavor of USB port, or a Thunderbolt 3 or 4 port.

System-side physical USB ports these days take the form of USB Type-A (the familiar, older rectangular kind) and USB Type-C (smaller and roughly oval). This physical type is not necessarily an indicator of which specific USB transfer-rate spec the port supports. But you need to make sure you can plug in what you get. (Credit: Zlata Ivleva)Bios is just not flexible enough. Open the 20+pcs of laptop screws and put the SSD to the place of the original HDD. Also: Don't confuse the system-side interface with the connector that joins the cable to the drive itself. On most newer portable SSDs, the connector at the SSD end is a USB Type-C port (the same as the kind you might find system-side)... (Credit: Zlata Ivleva)

Easy Upgrade: Installing an SSD caddy is a simple and straightforward process that does not require extensive technical knowledge. This makes it an easy upgrade for anyone looking to improve the performance of their laptop. Our typical benchmark-test results for even run-of-the-mill external SSDs show speeds in excess of 400MBps. Practically speaking, this means you can move gigabytes of data (say, a 4GB feature film, or a year's worth of family photos) to your external SSD in seconds rather than the minutes it would take with an external hard drive. (Credit: Zlata Ivleva) Generally, the higher a drive's capacity, the cheaper it will be per gigabyte. But that's not always true; sometimes the very highest-capacity drives come at a per-gigabyte price premium. The basement for budget external SSDs is currently about 7 cents per gigabyte, mostly from second- or third-tier vendors. Calculate your bottom-line price when comparing a host of drives. The SK Hynix Beetle is a drive to be seen with, a great conversation starter. The Beetle is small and light enough to be taken anywhere, and it offers some protection from tumbles. Its speed is comparable to other USB 3.2 Gen 2 SSDs we have reviewed. It’s priced a little higher per gigabyte than most external SSDs, but since its capacity maxes out at 1TB, you can still have this gem without it busting your budget.

WD Black P50 Game Drive SSD

This is also where a spec known as the "terabytes written" rating (or TBW) comes in. It refers to how much data can be written to a drive over its life before some cells on that drive begin to fail. The entire drive itself won't stop functioning, but rather, less and less storage will be made available as time goes on. On others, though, the connector might be a Micro-USB Type-B, which is a flat, wide connector that is different from any USB port you'll see on a laptop or desktop. Need to expand the local storage on your PC or Mac for music and movies, or all the pics and videos you collect from your phone? The traditional answer has been an external hard drive. The newer, better answer is a portable solid-state drive (SSD). The Orico’s M2PV-C3’s design is less polarizing than that of the SSK SHE-C325, but it actually uses cheaper materials, as the top panel is ridged aluminum but the sides and bottom are ABS plastic. RUGGEDIZATION. The degree of ruggedness does vary from drive to drive, with drives like the ADATA SE800 leading the field at the moment among mainstream-price external SSDs. IP68 certification is a good spec to look for if you're serious about waterproof and dustproof drives. (Credit: Zlata Ivleva)