SanDisk Extreme Portable SSD V2

£160/$160 (1TB) shop.westerndigital.com

This is not SanDisk’s top-of-the-range portable SSD – that honour goes to the Extreme Pro Portable SSD V2 (see right), but this non-Pro version is still the one to go for. That’s because almost no computer currently available can fully utilise the extra speed offered by the Extreme Pro, so in real-world use it’s barely faster than this SSD.

SanDisk quotes a peak read speed of 1,050MBps for the Extreme Portable SSD.

We were able to verify this claim with the CrystalDiskMark storage benchmark app, although achieving such speed in real-world file transfers is unlikely. Despite testing with a fast laptop, we could ‘only’ manage a peak 780MBps while reading a large video file and 564MBps while writing it to the drive. Still, that’s fast, and image transfer speeds of 693/496MBps read/write are equally top-class. It should also be noted that a portable SSD will rarely perform as fast in actual file transfers as in a software benchmark.

Capacities come in 500GB, 1TB, 2TB and 4TB; the 1TB option makes most sense, as prices pretty much double in line with capacity. PROS Unparalleled speed; small and rugged; competitively priced CONS Max speed requires very fast computer; 2TB capacity very expensive