Jeff is Engadget's Senior Commerce Writer, which means he spends his days composing buying guides, deal roundups, and anything else that helps you more easily figure out which tech is worth your time. He's reviewed consumer electronics for more than a decade, a stretch that includes stints at Ars Technica and Business Insider.
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Essentially, you can divide today’s crop of portable SSDs into five segments. At the top are drives that utilize Thunderbolt 3 or 4 or thespec, which have a theoretical maximum transfer rate of 40 gigabits per second . Note that USB4 comes in two different variants, though, one of which is limited to 20 Gbps. Below that is USB 3.2 Gen 2x2, which also tops out at 20 Gbps. Then you have USB 3.2 Gen 2, which maxes at 10 Gbps. Next is USB 3.2 Gen 1, which is capped at 5 Gbps.
As a refresher, storage devices are broadly measured in terms of read and write speeds. The former refers to how long it takes to access something from the drive; the latter, how long it takes to save something to it. From there, you can break these metrics into sequential and random performance. Sequential speeds tend to matter more with portable SSDs, since most people use them to save or access long, constant streams of data such as a bunch of high-res photos.
Some portable SSDs build on this inherent ruggedness with plastic or rubberized casings and more robust waterproofing. These aren’t necessary for everyone, but if you’re a frequent traveler or someone who often works outdoors, there are options for you. We also timed how long it took for each drive to read and write a custom 70GB folder filled with roughly 11,500 different files, including photos, videos, music files, PDFs and other large and small data types scattered across numerous subfolders. We performed multiple passes for each test to avoid irregularities, and we kept track of each SSD’s heat levels over the course of the whole suite.
At those prices, the XS1000 is a good value for everyday backups and transfers. It kept up with or slightly edged the X9 Pro across our benchmarks: In our custom file transfer test, for example, its reads were a second faster, while its writes were only six seconds slower. It topped every USB 3.2 Gen 2 drive we tested in 3DMark’s gaming storage benchmark as well. It’s slightly thicker than the X9 Pro but still wonderfully portable, with its stubby rectangular design weighing just over an ounce.
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