It’s the day after Black Friday and there are still a lot of SSD deals floating around; this time around I am focusing on portable SSDs and I’ve hunted for the best value for money ones as we head to Cyber Monday. I’ve compiled a list of 50 external SSDs in the table below and sorted them out by price per GB.
External SSDs may not be as fast as or as cheap internal SSD but they have significantly dropped in price with the most affordable model costing just under $45 per TB, which is really competitive.
One trend I’ve noticed is that USB flash drives are often passed on as external SSDs and this is something that will most likely continue in the future as economies of scale and rising bill of materials make it easier to manufacture smaller external SSDs that can easily be passed on as USB flash drives.
For my list today, I’ve opted for 1TB or bigger portable SSDs (2, 4 and 8TB) as the smaller capacities no longer make financial sense. I’ve added warranty, speed and capacities as well.
While faster portable SSDs do exist (using either USB 4.0, USB 3.2 Gen2x2, Thunderbolt), do make sure that your systems are compatible.
A word about endurance: while internal SSDs usually publish their endurance numbers (usually in drive or Terabyte written), none of the external SSDs I’ve come across had this information. As such, I would urge anyone looking to use portable SSDs for write-intensive tasks (e.g. CCTV) to do further research.
Check out our black friday SSD deal pages for more offers, our main black friday deal page and our best SSD buying guide for the low down on the top deals.