External SSD Guide – Cheap, Fast & Rugged!

If you are looking for an external storage drive, especially a fast one that’s SSD based, this is the video for you. I’ve got a range of options to walk you through, including cheap, blazing fast, and rugged options, and even ones with “Military Grade” encryption. So, lets take a look. But first, if you haven’t already, consider subscribing for more videos like this one every Monday, Wednesday and Friday.

Lets start off with the main types of external storage. You’ve got USB Sticks that can vary in size, although the majority of drives around are going to be something like 8-64GB. They are USB based and either have Type A or Type C ports these days. They are generally a little on the slow side and not the most reliable but are cheap and plentiful. If you need more space, you can get larger drives either with hard disks inside, or solid state like these. Hard disk drives are normally cheaper, although much more fragile and significantly slower than SSDs.

When it comes to buying external SSDs, there are a few different kinds of them too. There are ‘Caddies’, empty enclosures that you install your own drives in to connect them via USB instead of SATA or M.2. These are generally the cheapest options since they are just ‘empty boxes’ with a converter board inside. This Sabrent M.2 enclosure is actually tool free too, and works with even their newest Rocket 4 Plus Gen 4 SSD. Sadly it only uses USB 3.2 10Gbps so you only get 1GB/s reads and writes, not the 7GB/s the drive is capable of but still.

The next type is the enclosed/prefilled options, like Samsung’s T lineup, or this Sabrent Rocket Pro. These come with the storage media preinstalled or baked in so the capacity you buy is what you’ve got. These come in a variety of configurations, this 1TB Rocket Pro is amazing. It feels like a solid block of aluminium, but isn’t much bigger than a standard M.2 drive and runs at 1GB/s reads and writes.

There are also “rugged” versions of those drives, like this Rocket Nano Rugged. This is IP67 rated meaning it can be submerged in 1M of water for 30 minutes without problems. It’s also drop tested and thanks to it’s silicone cover it just bounces when dropped rather than chipping the aluminium or damaging the drive. Surprisingly, the rugged version is only a tenner more than the Rocket Pro so I’d get one of these personally.

What about connectivity? Well, the main set of drives will use USB. Either Type A (often via a detachable cable), or newer drives will also offer USB Type C – although most drives with detachable cables will use USB C on the drive itself with only older designs using the old USB 3 Micro B port that was so, so awful. Some drives may use Thunderbolt 3 though, which uses the same physical port as USB C, but connects at 40Gbps rather than a maximum of 20Gbps with USB 3.2 Gen 2×2 and may not be USB compatible at all, like Samsung’s X5 drive. Those drives can offer much more performance, but if you don’t have Thunderbolt 3 ports, aren’t worth getting.

There are some drives with some extra features, namely added security. This can vary from fingerprint sensors like Samsung’s T7 Touch, to physical keypads that require password entry to even connect. Often the more security the drive has, the slower it’ll be. The iStorage diskashur SSD I have only writes at around 250MB/s, whereas these unencrypted Sabrent drives write at more like 500MB/s with peaks of 1GB/s.

We’ve talked a lot about the drive’s performance, so lets take a look at these Sabrent ones. As you can see in CrystalDiskMark, it’ll hit pretty much 1GB/s in reads and writes, with ATTO showing more like 950MB/s in writes and 930MB/s in reads. Still, blazing fast. Copying to it writes at just shy of 500MB/s across the full 98GB of data which is excellent, and duplicating those files writes at 300MB/s which is more than internal SATA SSDs!

So to wrap this up, if you need a way to use drives you already have, get an enclosure like this. If you want massive capacities for cheap, get a hard disk based drive. If you want speed, there is a wide range of both USB C and Thunderbolt drives from folks like Samsung and Sabrent for you. And if you care about security, get an encrypted drive like the T7 Touch, or for more security, the iStorage DiskAshur drives.