SanDisk Extreme Pro Portable SSD V2

£208/$230 (1TB) shop.westerndigital.com

The SanDisk Extreme Pro Portable SSD 1TB is actually SanDisk’s flagship portable SSD, boasting read/write speeds up to 2,000MBps – that’s nearly twice as fast as the non-Pro version. (Some retailers aren’t using the ‘V2’ designation, so look out for the 2,000MBps performance rating.)

In testing, we found real-world read/write speeds to be only slightly faster than the SanDisk Extreme Portable SSD V2. That’s because the Extreme Pro V2 requires the 20Gbps USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 interface, which allows for transfer speeds up to 2000MBps. But since almost no computers have USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 ports yet, you’ll find transfer speeds limited to 1,000MBps.

The CrystalDiskMark storage benchmarking app confirmed this, with max read write speeds of 1,049/1,032MBps. So there really isn’t much point spending the price premium for this Pro version over the non-Pro Extreme V2 portable SSD. However, USB 4 is being incorporated into the latest computers, and it’s backward compatible with USB 3.2 Gen 2x2, so a computer with USB 4 will unleash the full speed of this SSD. PROS Delightfully compact; super-speedy, even over USB 3.2 Gen 2 CONS Relatively expensive; maximum speed is almost unattainable right now