Im currently looking for two things: 1) a SSD working drive between 1-2 TB. Ill likely end up getting another MacBook with a SSD drive. Ive come to the end of the life of my 2012 MacBook Pro. I work with multimedia, photos and videos and music, and Im planning a new workflow setup.
![]() 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.And, 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. Torrent client for apple macWant a 2TB portable hard drive? You can find one from major brands such as Seagate and Western Digital for as little as $60. (Photo: Zlata Ivleva)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. 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.External 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 they're not, proceed with care. 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. However, checking the specs can be a dead giveaway. That also ties in with the port you'll plug your SSD into.Sellers of portable SSDs seldom indicate if the drive is SATA- or PCIe-based. (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. 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.SATA-based drives tend to be a little cheaper they're also slower, but just fine for most users' everyday applications. 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). Almost all external SSDs today plug into either some flavor of USB port or a Thunderbolt 3 or 4 port.Alas, there are enough different flavors of USB to make your head spin—made worse by the confusing nomenclature surrounding USB these days. SSD and USB: So Many Subtleties!Arguably more important than the type of storage mechanism inside an external SSD is how it connects to your PC or Mac. Speeds of 800MBps or higher indicate a PCIe-based drive. USB 3.1 Gen 2 is the latest version widely available in consumer external SSDs at this writing. (That's gigabits, not gigabytes, per second.) You also may see this interface dubbed USB 3.1 Gen 1 or SuperSpeed USB 5Gbps (in practice, all three are the same thing), to differentiate it from USB 3.1 Gen 2 or SuperSpeed USB 10Gbps, which raises the ceiling to (you guessed it!) 10Gbps. (Photo: Zlata Ivleva)In addition to 640MBps, you'll also see USB 3.0's theoretical data rate described as 5Gbps. Until recently, most SSDs' real-world transfer speeds topped out somewhere in the range of 450MBps or below, so these ports were fine. (These ports still exist on desktops and laptops, but you won't want to use one with any portable drive if you can help it, and all USB-interface external SSDs will support some flavor of USB 3.) The most commonly used port at your computer's end for external drives of all stripes is USB 3.0, which offers a theoretical peak bandwidth of 640MBps. (It gets better: The forthcoming USB4 will absorb Thunderbolt 3.) That said, you'll still see older USB terminology on your PC or Mac and on many SSDs, so you need to know what term correlates to what.To begin with, you can forget about USB 2.0, whose theoretical bandwidth of 60 megabytes per second (60MBps) is a bottleneck even for a platter drive. However, Thunderbolt 3 SSDs are not backward-compatible with USB Type-C ports that only support USB transfers. Those ports are actually USB Type-C connectors with the Thunderbolt support layered on top. Compatible ports are found on all late-model Macs and, increasingly, some upscale Windows laptops. All of these versions of USB are backward-compatible with the USB 3.0 ports on your PC performance will just bounce down to the slower of the two (the drive's supported spec, or that of the system-side port).You won't see many USB 3.2 Gen 2x2-capable ports on PCs so far (some late-model high-end desktop motherboards have one), but look to that new USB spec to matter more as the 2020s move on.Really, all this calls for a little chart to keep it straight.As you can see, some USB specs are tied to certain system-side physical USB connectors we'll get into that in a moment.and Then There's Thunderbolt 3Thunderbolt 3 offers a blazing top bandwidth of 40Gbps. With that change, you'll want to know these four modes: 5Gbps ( USB 3.2 Gen 1), 10Gbps ( USB 3.2 Gen 2x1, and Gen 1x2, the former achieving the 10Gbps speed on one "lane," the latter via two 5Gbps lanes), and 20Gbps ( USB 3.2 Gen 2x2, aka SuperSpeed USB 20Gbps). (And yes, we are talking about "USB 3.1" as opposed to "USB 3.2." Bear with us.)In 2019, the USB Implementers' Forum announced that the USB 3.1 flavors were being rebranded as USB 3.2. This physical type is not necessarily an indicator of which specific USB transfer-rate spec the port supports. The Last Interface Wrinkle: The Physical USB PortGot interface fatigue yet? Alas, that's not the last thing to consider around USB and Thunderbolt 3!System-side physical USB ports these days take the form of USB Type-A (the familiar, older rectangular kind) and USB Type-C (smaller and roughly oval). You can use a Type-C USB drive on a Thunderbolt 3 port, so you're not bound to buying a Thunderbolt 3 drive on a PC with only those ports, such as a Mac. You'll find Thunderbolt 3 on resolutely speed-focused drives, such as the Samsung Portable SSD X5 and on some specialized desktop-style drives that may contain multiple SSDs in a RAID format.Most workaday SSDs don't come close to saturating this interface, so there's no point in paying a premium for a Thunderbolt 3 drive unless you specifically need the speed. (Photo: Zlata Ivleva)Thunderbolt 3 is the least-common external SSD interface, and SSDs that use it are often geared toward Mac users, since all late-model Mac laptops have Thunderbolt 3 ports. Backup Drive 2017 Ssd Plus An Adapter(Photo: Zlata Ivleva)Many SSDs come with cables for both kinds (Type-A and Type-C) at the computer end, or one cable plus an adapter.
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