But if you need cavernous amounts of external storage, a hard drive is a better option for most, as multi-terabyte external SSDs sell for several hundred dollars, but 4TB portable hard drives can sell for under $100 (£90).

A portable SSD will also be much faster at reading and writing lots of data. If you don’t need terabytes of storage and you often travel with your drive, a portable SSD is worth paying extra for. But they’re also much slower and more fragile than solid-state drives. Portable Hard Drive or SSD? Drives that have spinning storage platters inside are very affordable, with 1TB models often selling for under $50 (£40).When shopping for an external drive or SSD, consider the following: If you're curious about the kinds of speed and features that will be available with cutting-edge and future external drives, check out Everything We Know About USB 4.0. Consider how rugged your drive needs to be, how much storage capacity you need, and what connections will be available in places where you'll want to plug in your drive. A super-fast drive at home won't be useful if you can't plug it in at work or school. But with a slew of external drives available, how do you know which is the right external drive to buy? Should you opt for a faster, more rugged (and more expensive) external SSD instead of a portable hard drive made up of comparatively fragile spinning platters? To help you pick the best portable external drive for your needs, we meticulously test and review dozens of drives as they become available and publish our list of specific recommendations of the best portable SSDs and hard drives on this page.īefore we get to the picks, there are a few important things to think about, whether you need a drive for work, school or home use.

32 gig external solid state hard drive