Any recommendations for a portable SSD?

[Fenris321]

The short of it is, my PC is pretty much at the end of its life cycle tech wise. The microscopic SSD is often left with less than 10 GB of storage on it, so as a band aid fix, until I can afford a newer PC I'd like to get a 1 TB SSD to play games off of. Also with a portable SSD, when I do get a new computer, I figure it will be easier to transfer the files I want to keep from one PC to the other.

My price range would be about $70 to $120 US dollars (maybe a bit more), and I've found several on Amazon. The problem is that while many have ten to twenty thousand positive ratings, there are still enough negative ratings to make me wary of trusting the rating system alone. Granted much of the negative reviews came from Mac users, and I'm not on a Mac. I mean if it were a PC game I was interested in, I'd completely ignore the rating system (people love review bombing), and just watch on YouTube to decide for myself. I figure since I cant do that for hardware, I'd do the next best thing and just ask.

A lot of the ones I'm seeing say "up to 1050MB/s", so I'm guessing I'd want one at least that fast (they do have slower ones advertised also). My worry is the "up to" part of the post. So potentially there are circumstances that would make them slower? I don't know if the 1050MB/s transfer rate is just for moving files, or if that includes games as well. And yeah, I know cables matter as well.

Basically, is anyone using a portable SSD for gaming? And are there any brands or models they'd recommend?

Thanks,

[CBJ]

The most important question is what kind of port you're going to plug it into. If your PC is fairly old then you probably won't be able to unlock the full speed potential of the drive because of the limitations of the connection. At a guess you'll be using USB, but probably only USB3.0 or at best USB3.1, neither of which can keep up with the latest SSD drives.

In terms of brands, I'd stick to the better known names such as Samsung or WD, or maybe Crucial or Kingston at a push, and not risk a name you don't recognise.

[alt3rn1ty]

Hmm, as a band aid fix have a look at PCMag suggestions https://uk.pcmag.com/ssd/17645/the-best-external-ssds
They usually do very good comprehensive testing.

The limitation though as you already mention is going to be the speed of the connector to the PC.

I use them as Backup devices for my documents/music/pictures etcetera in case the Laptop dies or for total reset/re-install of the OS, and especially for the Windows major updates we are railroaded into these days. For those purposes they are brilliant, and enable you to disable Cloud storage solutions and the occasional problems they can cause, such as Windows OneDrive, or Steam backups etcetera causing games to reject your saves .. X4 Foundations gets upset about such things, forget the details but each time I see a topic with similar issues I am so glad I dont use any cloud storage solutions.

Personally though I have no idea how they would perform used as a temporary main drive.

Quote from the link above:

The drawback to the WD Black is that USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 ports that allow its full performance potential are rare, found on only a few elite desktop motherboards and usually added via expansion cards. (The drive, of course, works fine with slower ports; it just doesn't see the peak speed benefit.) But if you want an SSD that's as swift as it is stylish, look no further.

As CBJ said it depends on the port to be used as to how much of a data transfer bottleneck you experience.

[CBJ]

Personally though I have no idea how they would perform used as a temporary main drive.

I'm assuming it wouldn't be used as a system drive. In the OP's situation I'd keep the small internal drive as the system drive, and make as much space as possible on that by moving everything that didn't need to be there onto the new secondary drive. I'd also be very careful to back up anything that was stored on the external drive that couldn't simply be re-downloaded or restored from the cloud. Although SSDs drives are less susceptible to knocks than external HDDs used to be, they are still more vulnerable to both loss and damage by the mere fact that they are outside the PC case.

[alt3rn1ty]

Personally though I have no idea how they would perform used as a temporary main drive.

I'm assuming it wouldn't be used as a system drive. In the OP's situation I'd keep the small internal drive as the system drive (which is how I read the OPs idea), and make as much space as possible on that by moving everything that didn't need to be there onto the new secondary drive. I'd also be very careful to back up anything that was stored on the external drive that couldn't simply be re-downloaded or restored from the cloud. Although SSDs drives are less susceptible to knocks than external HDDs used to be, they are still more vulnerable to both loss and damage by the mere fact that they are outside the PC case.

Yeah I understand, when I said temporary main drive I meant like using it as if it was a secondary internal drive. Thats how I use my second internal SSD, the Samsung 970 EVO, its just for games and storage while the system main SSD is just for Windows and a few tools.

I have two external USB SSDs, when I do a backup I do it twice, in case as you say one of them also unfortuantely goes belly up at the worst possible times I mentioned, OS re-install etcetera.
I still think old spinning external USBs are a bit more reliable as very long term storage, at worst they can have the data recovered off them using Steve Gibsons Spinrite, whereas external SSDs are potentially really bad if they go belly up at the worst possible moment.

[Fenris321]

Yeah it is a USB 3.0 (or I suppose a 3.2 gen 1), which shows up at 600MB/S (or 625MB/S depending on which one is looked up).

I was planning on using it for gaming only. I suppose I could just leave the small internal SSD for the OS (that's where it is now anyway), the external SSD for gaming only, and make sure I back up the games save files to the internal HDD in case the external SSD goes belly up.

If it doesn't work, I suppose I'll still have it for transferring anything I want to save when I get a new PC. As for brands I suppose I'll stuck with Samsung, other than one phone that wanted to catch on fire they've been pretty good for me so far

Thanks for the help, I haven't been keeping up with PC tech for about 7 years now, so I'm really out of the loop.

[burger1]

You could get a sata cable type ssd.

Mainboard model?

You could transfer your games via your home network by making the pcs discoverable, etc.... If the games are on the drive just transfer the drive as long as it isn't an os drive.

Not sure what to do if your pc has esata ports and a cable.

So you want an m.2 type external drive vs an external 2.5 " ssd?

Not sure if a pcie add on card for m.2 drives would be good?

examples:

https://www.amazon.ca/s?k=pcie+m+2+nvme ... doa-p_2_13

Also just an fyi some old drives are better value than newer drives and drives produce vastly different amounts of heat so keep that in mind. There's also different types of drives like drives with different dram cache sizes, some are dramless and there's other different systems. The longer the warranty usually the better the drive. Samsung had at least one drive that would go into write protect mode when new so you had to update the firmware to avoid this issue so maybe watch out?

[alt3rn1ty]

Oh yes I have another tip for SSDs, never fill them more than half full.

I'm following Steve Gibsons development community on the next version of Spinrite, and they have found some drives which have the marketing blah about how much they can store and speeds achievable change their behaviour if the drive is more than half full.

When SSDs first came out the more expensive ones were SLC (Single Layer Chip), and were very fast if unrefined at the time. Since then manufacturers have tried to make them bigger capacity, and now we have Multi Layer Chips.

Manufacturers have realised they can get the firmware on those drives to now (as a simple example) not just write one bit per cell, the cells are capable of storing more data, so why not write 2 x the information to the cell and double the capacity. They realised this also slows down the drive ..

TLDR : Some SSDs when you buy them are very fast, because they are writing one bit per cell, but then when the drive gets more than half full the firmware switches mode to write more data per cell, taking the drive up to its full advertised storage capacity, but reducing the speed of the drive.

So buy a drive twice as big as what you expect to use and never take it over half way full.