Sandisk Extreme Pro Portable SSD V2

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

The Sandisk Extreme Pro Portable SSD 1TB is actually Sandisk’s flagship portable SSD, boasting read/write speeds up to 2000MB/S – that’s nearly twice as fast as the non-pro version (some retailers aren’t using the ‘V2’ designation, so look out for the 2000MB/S 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 20Gb/s USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 interface which allows for transfer speeds up to 2000MB/S. But since almost no computers have USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 ports, you’ll find transfer speeds limited to 1000MB/S.

The Crystaldiskmark storage benchmarking app confirmed this, with max read write speeds of 1049/1032MB/S. 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; max speed is almost unattainable right now