

The 20 and 40 Gbps speeds are nicer, but not worth it unless you are a creative professional.

If you are getting an external SSD and your PC has at least one 10 Gbps port, we recommend spending a little extra to upgrade to 10 Gbps.

But if you need cavernous amounts of external storage, a hard drive is a better option for most, as multi-terabyte external SSDs sell for several hundred dollars, but 4TB portable hard drives can sell for under $100 (£90). A portable SSD will also be much faster at reading and writing lots of data. If you don’t need terabytes of storage and you often travel with your drive, a portable SSD is worth paying extra for. But they’re also much slower and more fragile than solid-state drives. Portable Hard Drive or SSD? Drives that have spinning storage platters inside are very affordable, with 1TB models often selling for under $50 (£40).
