The Best External Solid State Drives to Backup Your Computer Quickly and Safely

Cloud services like Dropbox have made it easier than ever to store your data in the cloud, which is incredibly convenient, but a little dangerous. Accessing your files (or uploading new ones) requires an internet connection, and storing a lot of data requires you to pay a monthly subscription. Your information can also be compromised if the cloud service you subscribe to gets hacked.

That’s why we recommend keeping a local backup of your entire computer (or at least the most important files) on an external SSD. External SSDs differ from traditional external hard drives in two significant ways. First, they store your data on memory chips (like your phone or tablet), not a large, spinning disk. This allows them to read and write data a lot faster than external hard drives can. Second, an SSD has no moving parts, which means its far less likely to get damaged, especially when it’s moving around in a backpack or piece of luggage.

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The trade off is that external SSDs have a smaller storage capacity than external hard drives. If you mostly rely on streaming services for your music, TV shows, and movies, you likely don’t have a lot of big files on your computer. You’re photo library, which should be backed up multiple times, is likely the largest and most important set of data on your machine. Data loss because of a computer crash can mean recreating important documents and presentations (at best), or losing the ability to access one of a kind pictures of your family (at worst), which is why keeping a local backup on an external SSD is a great idea.

What Are the Best External SSDs?

There are many factors to consider when choosing the right external SSD for you; below are the most important ones, which we considered while we were researching this list.

Storage capacity: The amount of data an external SSD can hold is measured in GB (Gigabytes) or Terabytes (TB). A good rule to follow is to have one that’s twice the size of your computer’s internal hard drive or SSD, so it can store multiple versions of the same files, or different backups. Our external SSD recommendations are available in multiple sizes, and run the gamut between 240GB and 2TB, so check how much data is on your computer’s drive before you make a final decision.

Read and write speed: The speed at which an external SSD and writes data is important to consider because it ultimately determines its performance. We chose drives that support the USB 3.0 standard, which has a maximum data transfer speed of 640mbps, USB 3.1 standard, which has a maximum data transfer speed of 1,280mbps, and USB 3.2 standard, which has a maximum data transfer speed of 2,000mbps. Your actual speeds will vary based on how many files you’re trying to transfer at once, or the size of the files you’re transferring.

Connector: You can connect any of our external SSD picks to your computer with a USB-A cable, but most of them are also compatible with USB-C. Using a USB-C cable will substantially improve your external SSD’s read and write speeds.

Portability: All of our external SSD recommendations are bus powered, which means they draw electricity from your computer’s USB port. Because they don’t need to connect to an outlet, you can take your external SSD with you everywhere. We also made sure our picks were small, which makes them even easier to carry.

Compatibility: External SSDs are one of the few tech accessories that are universally compatible, which means all of the ones we recommend in this guide can be used on either a PC or Mac. Keep in mind both MacOS and Windows use different file systems, so you may have some difficulty moving files back and forth between a Mac and PC.

1. OWC Envoy Pro Mini

OWC’s Envoy Pro Mini is an external SSD that looks (and operates) like a super powered flash drive. It’s available in two storage sizes: 240GB and 480GB, which means its the lowest capacity drive in our guide. OWC says the drive has a maximum read and write speed of “over 410mbps,” but I ran a benchmark using BlackMagic’s Disk Speed Test application on my Mac, and got a read speed of 425mbps and write speed of 143mbps. Your results may vary, but in practical everyday use the Envoy Pro Mini performed really well; it never felt slow.