The Best Portable SSD

Wirecutter has been researching and recommending solid-state drives since 2013. As Wirecutter’s (and formerly PCMag’s) storage expert, I’ve evaluated a multitude of storage devices—from portable and desktop hard drives to SSDs to NAS devices to USB flash drives to microSD cards—to find the best options.

Portable solid-state drives are great for travelers and for people who frequently transfer large amounts of data between computers. Since SSDs have no moving parts, they can handle the bumps when you toss your travel bag on a couch, say, after a tiring trip or commute. If you need a drive just to back up your data at home, and you aren’t worried about having the fastest transfer speeds, a portable hard drive is much less expensive, though it’s also slower, larger, less durable, and potentially less secure.

Portable SSDs are three to six times faster at transferring files than portable hard drives or desktop external drives. They’re also more secure and much more compact and durable, and they run cooler on less power. They are more expensive, however. Prices have come way down in the past few years, but a 1 TB portable SSD still costs about $80 to $150—for that price, you could get a 4 TB to 5 TB portable hard drive or an 8 TB desktop hard drive.

If you spend most of your time working at the same desk or need more than 4 TB of storage, get an external desktop hard drive. A desktop hard drive is faster than a portable hard drive and much less expensive than a portable SSD for a similar amount of storage, but it’s bulky, so you shouldn’t plan to travel with it.

Though a portable SSD looks like a relatively simple device, we took all of the following factors into account when we decided which model to recommend:

• Reliability and toughness: A portable SSD must keep your data safe. Since portable SSDs lack moving parts, they are less susceptible than mechanical drives to total failure when dropped, jostled, or subjected to changes in temperature or vibration. A portable SSD should also be sturdily built and not feel creaky or hollow.
• Endurance: Flash-memory cells can be written to only so many times before wearing out. You’d have to write hundreds of terabytes of data to even begin to wear out most SSDs, though, and few people approach that limit. But better endurance is a bonus, especially if you’re using your drive for high-intensity tasks such as 4K video editing. Since SSD manufacturers don’t report durability ratings for external drives (only for internal models), we keep an eye on buyer reviews for reliability information. For example, we note when reviewers mention that their SSDs run hot; too much heat during operation can shorten the drive’s life or indicate that the drive is defective.
• Drive speed: SSDs provide dramatically faster transfer speeds than mechanical drives, so there’s less waiting for files to copy. We tested both sequential and random speeds. Although fast sequential speeds are important for transferring and backing up large blocks of data to your drive, quick random speeds are essential if you must run programs or games directly off your portable SSD.
• Connection type: For this review we primarily considered portable SSDs with USB-C connectors, which are replacing older, slower USB Type-A ports on thinner laptops. But all the drives come with either a Type-A adapter or a separate cable to ensure compatibility with the desktop PCs, laptops, gaming consoles, and tablets you may have around your home. As a result, you still get the best speeds that your computer can handle, and your drive will be able to keep up with newer devices in the future.
• Price: More expensive portable SSDs can offer faster write and read speeds, but you shouldn’t overpay for extra speed or other features that you may not even notice. For instance, OWC claims that the Envoy Pro FX has speeds of up to 2,800 MB/s—more than twice as fast as those of the Samsung T7 Shield. But for most people, paying two to three times more than the price of our pick for that speed isn’t necessary. Unless your time is worth hundreds of dollars an hour, shaving a few seconds off a file transfer or backup isn’t worth the extra expense.
• Capacity: Currently, an SSD with a capacity of 1 TB or so and a price tag of $70 to $90 represents the best mix of affordability, space, and speed. Drives with capacities of 4 TB tend to be about as cost-effective at about $300. Our picks for the best laptops have 256 GB to 512 GB of drive space, so a 1 TB portable SSD allows you to back up such laptops with room to spare.

• Size and weight: A portable SSD should be light and compact—many are roughly the size of a stack of sticky notes or even smaller.
• Encryption: Portable SSDs that support the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES), developed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), can more reliably protect your sensitive information. External solid-state drives with AES don’t require software to set it up, although they should include password-protection software to enable the encryption to keep your data safe from unauthorized access even if someone removes the drive from its housing. Not all portable SSDs offer this feature, and we’ve seen technical issues crop up, particularly during upgrades of operating systems such as macOS.
• Software: Backup software is a nice addition to a portable SSD, but it’s not essential. You can find plenty of backup-service alternatives online.
• Indicator light: Some drives have an LED indicator that lights up when the drive is connected to your device, and although this indicator is not a requirement, we found it useful.
• Warranty and customer service: Three-year warranties are standard among portable solid-state drives, though a few come with five-year warranties. Strong customer service is also valuable when something goes wrong.

To find worthy contenders, we investigated the most popular portable solid-state drives on Amazon, and we checked online reviews on tech sites such as AnandTech, Dong Knows Tech, and PCMag. We also scoured the websites of well-known external-SSD manufacturers such as LaCie, Samsung, SanDisk, and Western Digital.

We used synthetic benchmarking software, CrystalDiskMark and HD Tune, to test each drive’s sequential and random speeds. For a more real-world measurement, we then timed the transfer of a 15 GB folder that included a Blu-ray movie and a 31 GB folder of music. We ran all of our tests on a Dell Latitude laptop; its NVMe PCIe solid-state drive and USB4 port were fast enough to avoid bottlenecking the drives we tested. We also explored each drive’s included software, if it had any, and we checked build quality to confirm that there were no obvious red flags.

The Samsung T7 Shield (1 TB) is the best portable solid-state drive for most people because it’s reliable, fast, and reasonably priced, and like most of the portable SSDs we tested, it’s compact enough to partly hide under a stack of sticky notes. At this writing, it’s one of the more economical 1 TB SSDs we’ve tested, though the race is tight in that regard. The T7 has a single USB-C port that supports transfer speeds of up to 10 Gbps (USB 3.2 Gen 2). Because the drive comes with both USB-C and USB-A cables, you can connect it to most desktops, laptops, and game consoles. It also includes easy-to-use software to monitor and protect your data. Plus, it has a rugged case and a three-year warranty, which matches the coverage of its competitors.

Real-world file transfers in minutes

The T7 Shield is much faster than a portable hard drive. The T7 Shield is similar in speed to other quick SSDs—in our real-world speed tests, both the 1 TB and 4 TB versions posted times within a few seconds of the other 13 drives we evaluated for this update. And they’re all multiples faster than the portable hard drive pick we crowned recently, the WD My Passport Ultra. Whereas the T7 Shield took less than 30 seconds to transfer our 15 GB test folder with two huge files, the WD My Passport Ultra hard drive would take over two minutes. Likewise, the 31 GB folder with thousands of music files transferred in about a minute and a half on the SSD but would take almost five minutes to copy on the hard drive.

Our current pick for portable external hard drives managed read speeds of 129 MB/s and write speeds of 119 MB/s on the CrystalDiskMark benchmark measuring sequential read and write speeds (transferring large files one after another, similar to when you’re backing up your laptop’s main drive). Compare those figures with the results we got from the T7 Shield, which zipped through the same test at speeds of 1,060 MB/s and 997 MB/s, respectively. Our former SSD pick, the Western Digital My Passport SSD, was slower but still speedy, at 913.6 MB/s and 949.6 MB/s, respectively, on the same tests. You spend more on an SSD for its speed, and the T7 Shield is quick, more than enough to justify the expense.

It’s an excellent choice for expanding your laptop’s or game console’s storage. On the CrystalDiskMark test, which is designed to simulate the demands of tasks such as transferring multiple small files or running programs off the external SSD, the T7 Shield was a strong performer. In these tests, the T7 Shield had random read and write speeds near the top of the range, 30 MB/s and 81 MB/s, respectively, whereas our former pick, the WD My Passport SSD, was closer to 23 MB/s read and 40 MB/s write. Having a drive with twice the write speed is significant for day-to-day use; if, for example, you back up seldomly played games off the internal SSD in your Xbox or PlayStation to free up the space for new games, and then reinstall them later on demand, it’s a lot faster and more convenient than reinstalling them over the internet.

It has a useful drive-activity LED. The light lets you see at a glance whether the drive is transferring files, so that you know when it’s safe or not safe to unplug the drive.

It has easy-to-use software to enable extra features. Like many of the drives we tested, the T7 Shield comes with a software utility, in this case Samsung Magician for Windows, though you don’t have to install the program to use the drive. The software allows you to check on the drive’s health, enable password security, and migrate your programs and operating system to the portable SSD if necessary. If you’re familiar with Windows’s erase-drive commands or macOS’s Disk Utility, you can skip it.

Flaws but not dealbreakers

The T7 Shield is physically larger than our former top pick. However, it is still compact overall, and its bumpers are likely to protect it from the occasional drop or from a little jostling as you toss it into your commute bag. Aside from the Adata SE900G, all of the drives in this round’s test group are about the size of a full set of standard playing cards or smaller, and they certainly will fit in an accessory pocket on a laptop backpack.

Samsung SSDs have a shorter warranty. On the T7 Shield, Samsung offers three years of protection, which is less than the five years that SanDisk and Western Digital offer on their drives. But external hard drives typically have only one or two years of coverage, so three years is solid in comparison.

For our upgrade pick, we opted for more storage space rather than faster speeds. An SSD speed boost comes with a much higher price—at a 4 TB capacity, some drives can be up to twice as fast on a few tests but double the price.

The 4 TB T7 Shield offers a significant boost in storage space. Compared with its 1 TB sibling, the Samsung T7 Shield (4 TB) has a similar per-gigabyte cost of about 8¢ per gigabyte. At this writing it commands a 275% increase in overall price, but that’s in return for 300% more storage space.

The USB-IF has certified USB 4.0, which will continue to use the USB-C physical interface but will incorporate Thunderbolt 3 speeds and some of Thunderbolt 4’s specs. As a result, a fully compliant USB 4 drive will be able to transmit up to 40 gigabits per second.

What does that mean? Although all future portable hard drives and SSDs will have physically compatible USB-C interfaces (and cables), you’ll still have to check the specs to determine the speed of your drive. For the time being, USB 3.2 Gen 2 sits in the sweet spot of price and speed.

New portable SSD drives are smaller, faster, and more rugged, which are features that may differentiate them from our picks. These include the Lexar SL500 and OWC Envoy SSD. We’re evaluating them and plan on testing them in our next roundup.

Our previous top pick and runner-up were the Western Digital My Passport SSD (1 TB) and the SanDisk Extreme Portable SSD V2 (1 TB), respectively. Though both drives are still available and have class-leading five-year warranties, the Samsung T7 Shield is measurably faster on some of the benchmark tests, such as CrystalDiskMark. The 4 TB version of the WD My Passport SSD ran at the same speed as the T7 Shield and had a similar price but grew warm to the touch during our tests.

Note: Western Digital, the manufacturer of SanDisk and Western Digital drives has identified a firmware issue that can disconnect the SSD unexpectedly from your computer, potentially causing data loss. This bug can affect the SanDisk Extreme Portable SSD V2, the SanDisk Extreme Pro Portable SSD V2, and WD My Passport SSDs in 1 TB, 2 TB, and 4 TB capacities. Some of these models have been tested by Wirecutter. While we have not experienced data loss in our long term testing, other technology outlets like Ars Technica and The Verge have. If you currently have one of these drives, check Western Digital’s support site for a firmware fix or possible replacement.

In our latest round of testing, we examined the Samsung T9 Portable SSD, which is similar to the Samsung T7 Shield, but with a nominally faster USB 3.2 gen 2x2 interface. When we tested it on our Thunderbolt 4- and USB4-equipped laptop, the T9 was faster on CrystalDiskMark’s sequential read and write tests, but it has similar performance to the Samsung T7 Shield on other tests. The T9 has a longer five-year warranty. Because its price has been historically more expensive than the T7, we recommend the T9 as an alternative if the price is lower than our pick.

We also tested the Adata SD810 in 1TB and the Crucial X10 Pro in 1 TB and 4 TB capacities. All three SSDs are a little bit less expensive than the Samsung T7 Shield and T9 SSDs at the same capacities, and all three also support the USB 3.2 gen 2x2 interface. The SD810 and X10 Pros were faster than the Samsung T7 Shield at the HDTune benchmark tests, but were similar or worse on the other tests. The Crucial X10 Pro is worth considering if you’re space constrained, as it is physically smaller than the other SSDs here.

Samsung’s Portable SSD T7 lacks the T7 Shield’s rubber bumper. It’s a good alternative if you find it for significantly less than our top pick.

Samsung’s Portable SSD T7 Touch includes a touch sensor that allows you to unlock the drive with a recognized fingerprint. The fingerprint reader can help you get into the habit of locking your data securely, but we don’t think it’s worth paying extra for.

The OWC Envoy Pro Elektron and the OWC Envoy Pro FX (4 TB) are even more ruggedly built than the Samsung T7 Shield, and both were measurably faster in reading files, but typically they cost anywhere from $60 to $350 more than our picks. The OWC Envoy Pro Mini is shaped like a USB thumb drive but is all metal like the other OWC Envoy Pro drives; the Mini was faster than our picks on the HDTune tests but was in line with the other SSDs we evaluated in our real-world timed tests.

The Adata SE880, the Kingston XS2000, and the 4 TB Sandisk Professional G-Drive SSD performed similarly to the T7 Shield models but usually cost more than our picks.

The Lexar Blaze Gaming Portable SSD is physically larger than the competition and has a USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 interface. It might be worth the investment for storing games or in other situations where saving a few seconds truly counts.

We evaluated other current drives but dismissed them for various reasons, including high price (G-Technology G-Drive, SanDisk Extreme Pro Portable SSD V2, Seagate FireCuda Gaming SSD, Western Digital WD Black P50 Game Drive SSD), worse performance than our picks (Lexar SL200, PNY Pro Elite V2) a slower claimed transfer speed (Crucial X6), or an outdated USB 3.0 interface (Seagate Expansion SSD, Seagate One Touch SSD).

This article was edited by Caitlin McGarry and Arthur Gies.