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Speeds of 800MBps or higher indicate a PCIe-based drive. If the drive tops out at sequential read and write speeds between 400MBps and 550MBps, it's very likely SATA-based. However, checking the specs can be a dead giveaway.

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Sellers of portable SSDs seldom indicate if the drive is SATA- or PCIe-based.

That also ties in with the port you'll plug your SSD into. (Much more about that in a moment.) However, if you're going to be transferring large files such as videos often, you may well want to spring for a PCIe/NVMe-based external SSD. SATA-based SSDs typically top out at around 500MBps for peak read and write speeds, just a bit below the ceiling of the USB 3.0 interface. SATA-based drives tend to be a little cheaper they're also slower, but just fine for most users' everyday applications. The latter is usually associated these days with Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe), a protocol that is optimized for the characteristics of SSDs and speeds up data transfers.

Buy thunderbolt ssd external hard drive serial#

As a result, external drives use one of two internal 'bus types' that, in part, dictate their peak speed: Serial ATA (SATA), or PCI Express (PCIe). Inside and Out: Understanding External SSD InterfacesĮxternal solid-state drives are, essentially, internal SSDs (the same kind that power laptops or live inside desktops) with an outer shell and some bridging electronics. Physically larger external drives designed to stay on your desk or in a server closet still mostly use 3.5-inch platter drives inside, taking advantage of their higher capacities and much lower prices per gigabyte compared with SSDs. When considering whether to buy an external SSD, make sure you know what you're paying a premium for.Įxternal SSDs are now readily available and cheaper than they were a few years ago, but they'll probably never be a complete replacement for hard drives. If speed, resilience, and portability are critical to you, all that extra money is probably worth it.

That's not a typo-you'll pay four or five times as much for the same amount of storage. A 2TB external SSD, on the other hand, will run you about $250 to $300. Want a 2TB portable hard drive? You can find one from major brands such as Seagate and Western Digital for as little as $60. Still, you do pay for that speed and durability. Practically speaking, this means you can move gigabytes of data (say, a 4GB feature film, or a year's worth of family photos) to your external SSD in seconds rather than the minutes it would take with an external hard drive. Our typical benchmark-test results for even run-of-the-mill external SSDs show speeds in excess of 400MBps. (One factor is spin rate-among external drives, 5,400rpm units are more common and more affordable than 7,200rpm.) Just how much faster is it to read data from flash cells than from particular points on spinning platters? Typical throughput for consumer hard drives is in the range of 100MBps to 200MBps. By contrast, if you jolt an SSD while you're reading or writing data, there is no risk that your files will become corrupted and unreadable.Īnd, again, hard drives are slower because they have to physically access your data.

If you drop the drive, you could damage the interior mechanism and make your data inaccessible. But the same tech that makes hard drives a tantalizing value becomes their biggest liability when used on the go. Since hard drives are mechanical devices that use mature technology, you can get relatively huge amounts of storage capacity for the money. These are similar to the silicon that makes up a computer's RAM, but they retain your data when electrical power is cut off. Unlike a hard drive, which stores data on spinning platters accessed by a moving magnetic head, a solid-state drive uses a collection of 'persistent' flash memory cells to save data.