Hard Drive

Dump that poky portable hard drive! External solid-state drives are faster and more affordable than ever. 

Need to expand the local storage on your PC or Mac for music and movies, or all the pics and videos you collect from your phone? The traditional answer has been an external hard drive. The newer, better answer is a portable solid-state drive (SSD).

Once prohibitively expensive, SSDs of all stripes, internal and external, have plunged in price in recent years. Nowadays, pocket-size, USB-powered external SSDs deliver as much as 10 times the speed of portable hard drives, and much greater durability. They have no metal platters to spin up, nor any read/write heads that need to travel to a specific point on a platter to find the file you need. And a lack of moving parts makes mobile SSDs smaller, slimmer, and better suited to frequent travel and accidental drops than even ruggedized hard drives.