SSD drives

The best portable SSDS offer fast and convenient on-the-go storage and are the fastest way to keep your photos and videos backed up

Store your data quickly and on the go with these SSD drive picks

If all your photographs are fast filling your computer’s storage space – or you need to keep your digital portfolio portable – then it might be time to invest in a portable SSD. A conventional portable hard disk drive still offers the most bytes for your buck, but for top transfer speeds, a solid state drive – SSD – is a must. Transferring information to a bank of memory chips is far faster than writing this information to a spinning disc of magnetic material will ever be. SSDS are also far more robust. With no moving parts, there’s no mechanical wear and tear to worry about, or get damaged in the case of dropping the drive. They’re also far less power-hungry, and are usually powered via the host computer’s USB connection, rather than requiring a separate power supply. The best portable SSDS are also a fraction of the size and weight of a conventional portable hard drive, and though an SSD’S speed and portability still commands a premium over a traditional hard drive, pricing is now much more accessible.

The need for speed

The prices we’ve quoted here are for the 1TB model of each drive, for ease of comparison, but most of these are also available in a 500GB version for around half the price, as well as higher-capacity 2TB drives, which are usually (but not always) slightly better value in terms of price-per-gigabyte. For those with really extensive libraries, 4TB drives are becoming more readily available, but they come with a premium price tag.

Rather than testing transfer speeds using unrealistic benchmarking software, we instead recorded maximum sustained read and write rates when shifting large batchs of photos and video to and from a top-spec Windows 10 PC packing a fast internal m.2 SSD and USB 3.1 Gen 2 connectivity to ensure no testing bottlenecks.