Best external SSDs for gaming: 5 great portable performance drives

Price When Reviewed:

170 Euro

The competition is very close in the top tier of 20Gbps external drives, with the big-name contenders trading wins up and down the benchmark charts. But a winner is a winner, and in the end, the Lexar overtook our previous champ, Crucial’s X10 Pro, even if only by a hair.

The upshot is that you can expect excellent performance from the Lexar SL600. It also comes in a uniquely shaped form factor, complete with an opening to accommodate a lanyard, for easy toting. Gamers might appreciate that you can even add some bling by opting for the SL660 variant, which features RGB lighting within its miniature handle. The drive comes with the standard five-year warranty.

When performance is this closely matched among products, the determining factor should be price. And here, too, the SL600 is neck-and-neck with the Crucial X10 Pro, and priced slightly to significantly cheaper than some of its competitors, at least as of this writing — particularly at the 2TB level.

Best Prices Today:

If you tend to take your gaming drive everywhere, and/or you’re not the most careful person with hardware, a ruggedized external SSD is a practical answer.

The PNY RP60 offers more than just a rugged IP65-rated exterior that protects against dust and water droplets; and while very handsome and lightweight to boot, the drive is also an admirable performer, even besting one of the fastest 20Gbps drives we’ve tested — the Crucial X10 Pro — in a couple of our tests.

The RP60 is also competitively priced at $85 and $135 for 1TB and 2TB, respectively.

Best Prices Today:

If you’re after a very small SSD that you can easily fit into a pocket, the Sabrent Rocket Nano V2 is that. This USB 3.2×2 20Gbps drive measures a petite 2.73 inches long, 1.16-inches wide, and 0.44-inches thick. It weighs a dainty 1.7 ounces.

Of course, you’ll probably want to slide on its included shock-absorbing silicone jacket (shown in picture), which will add .06 inches to all its dimensions, while giving it a badass look.

But looks aside, the Nano V2 is a solid performer. It wasn’t quite at the same level as our top picks in everything, but it traded wins and losses within the pack. For instance it was second only to the Crucial X10 Pro in our 450GB write test. And it took the top spot in CrystalDiskMark 8’s random writes, and was very competitive in random reads.

This wee drive also comes in up to 4TB capacities, making it an all-around good choice if you’re looking to get a lot of storage and performance in a tiny package. We’re also fond of its five-year warranty and the nifty metal box it comes in, which can be repurposed for other uses.

Price When Reviewed:

161,90 Euro

A USB4 external SSD isn’t for everyone. Not only does your PC need to support the spec in order to take advantage of the 40Gbps transfers, but you’ll also need to be willing to pay a premium for the privilege.

If you’re ready to enter the club, however, the Adata SE920 EX will reward you with the fastest USB4 performance that we’ve experienced, and at a much more affordable price than our previous pick for USB4, the OWC Express 1M2 — we’re talking $170 for a 1TB Adata SE920 versus $230 for the OWC drive. And if you want a lot of capacity, the Adata SE920 EX comes with up to 4TB, for a reasonable $418 (compared to OWC’s $550).

In almost every benchmark, the SE920 EX beat the OWC Express 1M2 at 40Gbps performance, albeit by small margins. It also comes with a nifty built-in fan, which is activated by sliding open the enclosure. This kept our drive noticeably free of heat during our benchmark tests.

The SE920 EX is also quite portable at 4.13 inches long by 2.52-inches wide by 0.62-inches thick, and weighing 7 ounces — another advantage it has over the bulkier OWC Express 1M2.

In the end, the choice for a USB 4 external SSD is clear.

Price When Reviewed:

172 Euro

The LaCie Rugged SSD4 is the top choice for anyone looking to leverage the best performance from their USB4 or Thunderbolt 3 (or greater) ports.

In our benchmarks, the Rugged SSD4 proved to be the speediest 40Gbps USB4 overall that we’ve tested, albeit by a small margin. Even when tasking the drive to write several 950GB files consecutively, where you expect to see a drive slow down as its cache fills, the SSD4 never dropped below 1.65GBps — something videographers should take note of.

Its silicone jacket is IP54 rated for protection against dust and water spray, making it a good choice for anyone who needs storage out in the field. Its bright orange color makes it easy to find in a crowded bag or atop a cluttered workspace.

And while the SSD4 is not exactly cheap, it’s competitively priced.

This discrepancy is due to the difference between the binary and decimal number systems, their nomenclatures, and a Microsoft miscue. Your 2TB drive indeed has two trillion bytes of storage, and if you look at the byte count that Windows displays in a drive’s properties dialog, this should be what you see. This, in the International System of Units (SI/decimal), is two terabytes, or 2TB. This is the standard language vendors use as consumers are far more familiar with base 10.

However, Windows uses the newer International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) binary multiples 2^10 (Kibibyte/KiB), 2^20 (Mebibyte/MiB), 2^30 (Gibibyte/Gib). Binary multiples are larger numbers (one KiB is 1,024) so when Windows divides the total bytes by the IEC system, the you get something like 1.8TiB for a 2TB drive. Alas, Windows labels this as 1.8TB, misleading the user.

Other reasons you might not see as much available storage in the properties tab are formatting or partitioning. The file system uses some storage for file location and size info, etc. Also, some drives come with a small partition containing software so the main partition will be smaller than the drive’s total capacity.

SSDs don’t wear out or break mechanically like a hard drive, but their cells can only be written to so many times. SSDs generally have a TBW (terabytes that may be written) rating, but this is rarely provided by vendors for external SSDs. Hint: They may not use the same SSD inside throughout the product lifespan.

Most internal M.2 NVMe TLC SSDs are rated for around 600TBW per terabyte, and QLC types for around 200TBW, though the type of NAND in use is also rarely provided by vendors. That’s a lot of data, and a lot of SSDs are rated well below what they might achieve. You can guesstimate by using a utility to see how much data you write to an SSD a day and then doing the math.

External SSD warranties are generally between three and five years, but as with all such things, it’s a financial risk calculation for the company. As is the TBW. Our best guess based on experience is perhaps a decade. However, certain models have had issues long before that — generally due to a flaw or failure in the bridge chip or controller.