Advice about buying an external SSD or flash drive
Advice about buying an external SSD or flash drive
I am considering buying a portable device to store files, taking advantage of Black Friday prices. My candidates are:
-Crucial X9 Pro 2TB SSD. Up to 1050MB/s. About 120 euros.
-SSD Crucial 2 TB. Up to 1050 MB/s. About 125 euros.
-Crucial X10 Pro 2TB SSD. Up to 2100 MB/s. About 200 euros.
-SanDisk 2TB Extreme SSD. Up to 1050 MB/s. About 130 euros.
-SanDisk Extreme PRO 512GB flash drive. Up to 420 MB/s. About 80 euros.
My first doubt is whether I should consider a flash drive or an external SSD. An external SSD could give me more performance, but I don't want to lose portability. In case of choosing an external SSD, my doubt would be if paying the higher price (i.e., the Crucial X10 Pro) is worth it.
Any tip is welcome!
Following with my research, I found the Trascend ESD310C, which is like a flash drive but SSD. This seems ideal. Any experience with this device?
First of all, you can remove SanDisk SSDs from your list. Crucial internals are fine, however, I am not really sure about the external drives. One of the most decent external drive is Samsung t7 for me, really had no issues with it, the only thing that it gets hot after intensive use, but, I believe it's the case for any external SSD.
Thank you very much for the tips! Why should SanDisk SSDs be removed? The SanDisk Extreme PRO 512GB flash drive did not look bad to me.
Crucial internals are fine, however, I am not really sure about the external drives
I have a crucial external 1 TB from 4 years ago.
I haven't used it in 2 years; but I used it for installing skyrim mods. It worked fine and allowed the game to load with almost 1 TB of mods. The weird part was that when I did some "patching" process to the modlist, which takes 1-2 hours while at work, the disk always stopped being read in the middle of the process, something that didn't happen when I did it at home. Since balance at that level is extremely important and idk, some file might have corrupted, I always restored from my backup before attempting the process again.
The best description about crucial drives, I believe, that it's just works. No major issues with it so far.
Depends on how much you value portability vs performance.
If I plan to take a device anywhere, I don't want a cord, period. Then again I'm male and don't carry a sack or purse so there's that limitation. If traveling and I had a suitcase, it's less of an issue.
At the same time, USB flash drives with good performance (integral SSD controller and enough parallel lanes/chips to do so), tend to get pricey per capacity, and the amount of data out there to store just keeps growing, so it would be hard for me to accept getting a 512GB flash drive when the other alternatives are 4X the capacity, unless you also have other storage like HDDs and this is just to sneakernet data around.
Anyway I never found a need for an external SSD. Almost all use cases I have, are better met by a fast USB flash drive, or client and server side internal or USB external 3.5" HDDs.
Thank you very much for the tips! I would also prefer a USB flash drive, for that reason. Could the Trascend ESD310C (https://www.anandtech.com/show/18920/transcend-esd310c-dualinterface-ufd-review-silicon-motion-powers-portable-ssd-in-a-thumb-drive) be a good alternative? It seems to combine the form of a USB flash drive with SSD technology.
I would add that flash drives are also less reliable. If you store some important data there, I would go for an SSD.