The answer is - unsurprisingly - yes. See an internal SSD is just a bunch of components inside a casing (either plastic or metal), an enclosure that actually protects the electronics inside. Protecting it with an outer case is therefore superfluous unless you want to physically hide the drive for whatever reason or want to make it look more aesthetic. A striking RGB design and remarkable performance marks the Adata SE770G out as one of the best portable SSDs with a little something extra. 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) Overall, gamers and performance addicts who don't necessarily need to perform massive write transfers often but require very fast read performance can benefit from the XS2000's speed.

The availability of all three capacity points enables us to compare the XS2000 against almost all previously reviewed USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 drives. The list of portable SSDs evaluated as part of this review is provided below: Perhaps the only thing you don't need to weigh too heavily is the warranty. If your drive breaks because you damaged it, the warranty likely won't cover it. Even if the drive fails because of a manufacturing defect, most warranties simply replace the drive and don't cover the cost of recovery services that attempt to rescue your data from the device. A long warranty is well and good, but the real value in a drive usually lies in what you have on it. The Kingston XS2000 series is the first portable SSD family to use Silicon Motion's SM2320 platform. Available in three capacities - 500GB, 1TB, and 2TB, the drives promise speeds of up to 2000 MBps. The company sent across samples of all three capacity points in the lineup to put through our rigorous direct-attached storage evaluation process. The review below presents the detailed evaluation report of drives, with emphasis on the aspects that were not covered in the UFD controller preview. Introduction and Product ImpressionsExternal bus-powered storage devices capable of 1GBps+ performance have become entry-level offerings in the market today, with 2GBps+ starting to become mainstream. Rapid advancements in flash technology (including the advent of 3D NAND and NVMe) as well as faster host interfaces (such as Thunderbolt 3 and USB 3.2 Gen 2+) have been key enablers. Broadly speaking, there are five distinct performance levels in this market: 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). Yes. I cannot think of any scenario where it wouldn't be the case and just to confirm, we're talking of portable hard drives (the ones that can be carried around, smaller cousins of desktop or external hard drives). Hard drives are slower because they are mechanical; the data is stored on physical platters and accessed via a head located on an arm; similar to a turntable reading vinyls. Read our full Adata SD700 External SSD review Best portable SSD: FAQs What is the best portable SSD for laptops?

Speeds are fair, but unspectacular through its USB 3.2 Gen1 interface. In our benchmarks using CrystalDiskMark, it reached 433MBps and 427MBps in read and write speeds respectively. year warranty Lexar offers a three-year warranty on its SSD which is 3x what the likes of Seagate and WD offer for portable hard disk drives. Again, that's down to the fact that mechanical parts fail more often than electronics.

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.

As you can see, some USB specs are tied to certain system-side physical USB connectors. We'll get into that in a moment.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)