I am considering buying a portable device to store files, taking advantage of Black Friday prices. My candidates are:
-Crucial X9 Pro 2TB SSD. Up to 1050MB/s. About 120 euros.
-SSD Crucial 2 TB. Up to 1050 MB/s. About 125 euros.
-Crucial X10 Pro 2TB SSD. Up to 2100 MB/s. About 200 euros.
-SanDisk 2TB Extreme SSD. Up to 1050 MB/s. About 130 euros.
-SanDisk Extreme PRO 512GB flash drive. Up to 420 MB/s. About 80 euros.
My first doubt is whether I should consider a flash drive or an external SSD. An external SSD could give me more performance, but I don’t want to lose portability. In case of choosing an external SSD, my doubt would be if paying the higher price (i.e., the Crucial X10 Pro) is worth it.
Any tip is welcome!
Depends on how much you value portability vs performance.
If I plan to take a device anywhere, I don’t want a cord, period. Then again I’m male and don’t carry a sack or purse so there’s that limitation. If traveling and I had a suitcase, it’s less of an issue.
At the same time, USB flash drives with good performance (integral SSD controller and enough parallel lanes/chips to do so), tend to get pricey per capacity, and the amount of data out there to store just keeps growing, so it would be hard for me to accept getting a 512GB flash drive when the other alternatives are 4X the capacity, unless you also have other storage like HDDs and this is just to sneakernet data around.
Anyway I never found a need for an external SSD. Almost all use cases I have, are better met by a fast USB flash drive, or client and server side internal or USB external 3.5" HDDs.
Thank you very much for the tips! I would also prefer a USB flash drive, for that reason. Could the Trascend ESD310C (https://www.anandtech.com/show/18920/transcend-esd310c-dualinterface-ufd-review-silicon-motion-powers-portable-ssd-in-a-thumb-drive) be a good alternative? It seems to combine the form of a USB flash drive with SSD technology.