Is an external SSD over USB worth it? comparative.
Until very recently, the standard for portable storage was USB flash drives, because their small size allowed them to be transported anywhere without relying on external power for them. But times have changed and the external SSD has opened an important gap in that market. One that the pen drive cannot fill even if it wants to.
We are going to review the external storage options that have been and are currently on the market, with their advantages and disadvantages.
3.5 inch external hard drive
These types of units were the first to be used as external storage units. In fact, the concept is so old that these types of drives were already in use when the only drives available for desktop users were PATA drives.
Yes, it is true that they allowed information to be transported from one place to another, but in order to do so, you had to buy an external casing with its corresponding power adapter. Come on, to carry it you needed a separate backpack for all the cables plus the removable drive. Its file transfer rate was never the strong point of this type of solution, since it was highly dependent on what the installed hard drive was capable of providing.
On the other hand, one of the advantages of this type of unit is that its durability over time is greater than that of its other counterparts, but it is also fragility in use since a bad hit can cause the unit to collapse. damaged and all data stored on it is lost.
pen drive
The first pen drives or USB removable storage units began to appear on the market in the year 2000 with capacities that were measured in megabytes. However, as time went by, the capacities increased substantially, in the same way as their speeds, while their prices fell.
Today there are pen drives with a capacity of up to 2 TB, but something that the user should always keep in mind is that the NAND memory and the internal controllers that are usually used in their construction are not usually the ones with the best quality and are usually be units with a high propensity for erasure or corruption of stored data.
Not to mention that the write cycle limit of its cells is usually much lower than both an external SSD and an external mechanical hard drive.
2.5 inch external hard drive
2.5-inch hard drives are the natural evolution of 3.5-inch external ones. In principle, they require much less power, so the use of an external power adapter is no longer necessary (although the first models did require extra power from a second USB port).
Of course, they continue to maintain the benefits of 3.5-inch drives on data integrity, but the fragility of these drives to unforeseen shocks is also maintained.
external SSD drive
These types of removable drives are relatively modern in the removable drive market, although previously external casings were already sold that allowed an internal SSD to be mounted on them, thus turning it into an external drive.
An external SSD has numerous advantages over all the removable drives that we have mentioned above. As a principle, the NAND memory they use is of much better quality than that used in the manufacture of pen drives, so we ensure a greater longevity of the data that we have stored inside. On the other hand, these drives are usually several orders of magnitude faster than traditional pen drives, reaching in many cases a very similar performance to that of internal drives.
Another big advantage of these types of external drives is that, by definition, they are much more resistant to abuse than mechanical drives, something that is essential when you want to have a fully portable drive.
Of course, their main disadvantage is that they are also usually considerably more expensive than the rest of the units in all their capacities.
In short, the fastest and best removable drive you can buy is an external SSD.
