Portable SSDs

I need a couple of portable external SSDs 1TB & 2TB with USB-C.

Plenty out there from well known brands - Samsung, Toshiba, Micron, Sandisk &c and lesser known ones.

Does anyone have any experience? - what to buy, what to avoid, both brand and model?

Edited by MHC (Sat 23-Nov-24 23:29:47)

Did this recently, and posted my experience in the Apple sub-forum.

TL;DR
Better throughputs and was cheaper buy a decent name brand NVMe - in my case a 4TB Samsung 990 Pro - and chuck it in a decent enclosure (OWC Express 1M2), than it was with Samsung's own T9 portable drive.

[...Ebuyer have got 2TB 990 Pro's on B/Friday deal for £130 delivered]

I have a Samsung Portable SSD T7 2TB, it's the size of a credit card (except thicker) and comes with C and A type leads (C connector on the drive). Can't find the shop I ordered from but it was on sale at the time.

Also picked up a UGREEN M.2 NVME and SATA SSD enclosure which can accept M-Key or M+B at sizes 2280/2260/2242/2230 up to 2TB and presents as a USB-C connector.
This means makes it a portable drive with replaceable innards as well as a means of transporting an internal system drive (including for cloning or recovery).
Was exactly this time a year ago and faster models of this range are apparently cheaper now.

Former works fine and is used for external backup of multiple computers, latter may come in handy for when I replace an old Skylake system and want to take the drive out of that.

Edited by prlzx (Sun 24-Nov-24 00:41:54)

Will have detailed look kater ... Can currently get the 2TB 990 Pro for about £116 so even better. A full Samsung T7 Shield is around £113 for 2TB. Speed is massively faster on teh 990 Pro though - so add a case and it could be a good deal.

Ths, see my reply to @Pheasant about good Samsung deals. T7 shield @£113

I’ve got a couple of Samsung T7 USB-C SSDs. Fast, reasonably priced, very reliable.

Had a bit more of a read and look ...

Those enclosures look nice and the 990 Pro probably needs a good heatsink but the price, eeeeeeek!

For some other 1TB SSDs I have been using https://www.amazon.co.uk/Sabrent-Type-C-Tool-Free-En... but would it be good enough? I would err on the side of caution. The SSDs were "free" - I have the Dell retain my disk option in the service options with a couple of reapirs I have three!

As they will only be used for backups, I may well just go with Samsung T7 Shield - £66 and £113 direct from Samsung (no shipping either) for 1 & 2 TB. All three of you so far have commented on Samsung.

In reply to a post by MHC:

All three of you so far have commented on Samsung.

To be fair I have been running Crucial P3 Plus SSD's 4TB in an all-SSD NAS box. So far they have been fine too

Just looked at 990 PRO PCIe 4.0 NVMe M.2 SSD and they are just £202 to me! But that is getting silly for my needs.

In reply to a post by MHC:

But that is getting silly for my needs.

Pheasant's other thread shows the high performance achieved on Thunderbolt 4 and 5 ports on Apple hardware, but not everyone needs more than USB 3.2 10 Gbps on a Windows or Linux machine. Most of the other links for NVMe hardware max out at 3.2.

My 12th Gen Intel i7 machine has only 2x USB-C ports, and only one is 3.2 spec; despite two Gen 4 NVMe ports on the mobo.

In reply to a post by jchamier:

My 12th Gen Intel i7 machine has only 2x USB-C ports, and only one is 3.2 spec; despite two Gen 4 NVMe ports on the mobo.

at least one of those ports are wired to the chipset - two of three on my x570 is chipset wired - hello pcie 4x4 speed

In reply to a post by Taras:

at least one of those ports are wired to the chipset - two of three on my x570 is chipset wired - hello pcie 4x4 speed

I'm a B660 chipset, and yes, my Samsung Pro 980 NVMe drive reports PCIe 4 x 4 speed in the Samsung Magician tool.

Just a shame the mobo doesn't include USB 4 / Thunderbolt 4 ports; as my personal laptop, is a 12th Gen CPU with two USB-C connectors supporting those and they're about the same year

In reply to a post by MHC:

Just looked at 990 PRO PCIe 4.0 NVMe M.2 SSD and they are just £202 to me! But that is getting silly for my needs.

Samsung 990 Pro's are currently top of the tree in performance, from Samsung for internal NVMe based drives. So you can expect they will be pricey.

However I think its still possible to get pretty good price / performance bang-for-buck deal with these things.

Ebuyer still have them for £130 in the 2 TB size (which is actually cheaper than the same drive they are selling in the 1 TB size)

Samsung also offer a 5-year warranty on their T9 portable drives and 3 years on the others in their portable SSD range. I think most of their internal 990 back to 960 Pro range of internal drives are also 5-years (admittedly with a TBW limit also).

Post deleted by MHC

Was just looking at their 2TB 990 with Heatsink - £120 to me direct from Samsung with next day delivery.

Anyway, finally went for a couple of T7 Shield drives - plenty fast enough for my needs at present. 2TB in case with USB leads £113 delivered.

Are you getting an extra discount with that?

https://www.samsung.com/uk/memory-storage/nvme-ssd/n...

I can only see then for £144

I sure am ... 10, 20, 30 percent depending on product.

What’s the secret sauce 😂?