SanDisk Extreme Portable SSD 1TB up to 550MB/s read Solid State Drive

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Up to three-meter drop protection and IP65 water and dust resistance 5 mean this durable drive can take a beating. Why you can trust Tom's Hardware Our expert reviewers spend hours testing and comparing products and services so you can choose the best for you. Find out more about how we test. When you're dealing with an external platter-based hard drive, it makes little difference which USB interface you get, as long as it works with your PC; the speed of a hard drive won't challenge any of the modern USB 3.x flavors. Bottom line, when looking at rugged drives with a USB interface, you just need to be sure your PC or Mac has aphysically compatibleUSB port—that is, can you simply plug it in, and does the drive say it works with PCs, Macs, or both? This physical compatibility is what matters most, as a USB device will dial down to the slower speed of the two elements in play (the host system or the drive). We hooked up each external hard drive to a current-generation Dell XPS 17 laptop, using the best connection interface available to that drive, always in the same port, to minimize performance differentials. In my early career, I worked as an editor of scholarly science books, and as an editor of "Dummies"-style computer guidebooks for Brady Books (now, BradyGames). I'm a lifetime New Yorker, a graduate of New York University's journalism program, and a member of Phi Beta Kappa.

Data recording frequency? (your charts are smooth lines, without any points to indicate the datum points). Do you do it 1 or two datum points per second, or is it by data volume, as in 1 datum per GB or so? Therefore you need to be able to compare benchmark results as best you can, but that means you need sufficent details on the critical parameters used. Open the enclosure and disconnect the drive. Then, connect the drive to your desktop or laptop, following the manufacturer's instructions. It was all so simple once upon a time. USB 3 was your baseline. It offered a theoretical transfer rate of up to 5Gbits/sec (with real-world speeds closer to 300MB/sec). Then you had USB 3.1, offering speeds up to 10Gbits/sec and USB 3.2 delivering speeds up to 20Gbits/sec.

The best external hard drives you can buy in 2023

When used with a USB Type-C cable, the SanDisk Extreme rises above the competition with some stellar numbers. The design and form factor are spot on and while we have one reservation regarding the bundled cable, you can’t go wrong at this price.

A relatively new entry in Toshiba’s Canvio line-up, you can guess who the Canvio Gaming is aimed at. It gives you more space to run and store games on your last-gen Xbox One or PS4 console, and makes an ideal archive drive for games you’re not currently playing on an Xbox Series console, PS5 or PC. Sequential transfer speeds – 149.79MB/sec read and 156.78MB/sec write – are well above average, while its random write speeds are surprisingly good, though its random read speeds don’t really measure up. A few drives feature secondary enclosures that are removable, adding another layer of protection between the drive and the casing. These are typically sealed with O-rings all the way around, allowing the drive inside extra moisture protection. In other cases, the removable element might just be a rubber or silicone wrapper around an outer metal or plastic external-drive casing. For mechanical hard disks, the very fastest drives max out at 2Gbits/sec so there’s no need to go beyond USB 3.2 Gen 1. Are there any extra features worth having?Try plugging your external hard drive into a different USB port on your computer, to see if this makes a difference. It may help to restart your computer if this doesn't work, since this should "refresh" your ports if they're acting up. Given that even our fastest USB Type-C drive – the Kingston XS2000 – could only reach 2GB/sec over USB 3.2 Gen 2×2, that’s extremely impressive. From editing 4K, or even 8K, video to gaming, there’s nothing that this drive can’t handle. Get fast NVMe™ solid state performance featuring 1050MB/s 2 read and 1000MB/s 2 write speeds in a portable, high-capacity drive that’s perfect for creating amazing content or capturing incredible footage. Do you care more about speed, capacity, or price? If it’s the first, SSDs store data in flash memory rather than on spinning platters the way traditional hard drives do and thus operate a whole lot faster. The interface can also make a difference; Thunderbolt 3 will be a lot faster than USB, for example. The Extreme Portable SSD comes pre-formatted as an exFAT device which means that it can work on Windows and Mac out of the box. Reformattingit to NTFS will limit compatibility to Windows but will enable TRIM which will improve the longevity of the drive.