The Crucial X9 Pro is a competitively priced, highly portable external SSD that should appeal to most anyone. The X9 Pro is great for travelers, or indeed anyone who wants a fast, reasonably rugged and secure portable SSD. SATA-based drives tend to be a little cheaper; they're also slower, but just fine for most users' everyday applications. SATA-based SSDs typically top out at around 500MBps for peak read and write speeds, just a bit below the ceiling of the USB 3.0 interface. (Much more about that in a moment.) However, if you're going to be transferring large files such as videos often, you may well want to spring for a PCIe/NVMe-based external SSD. That also ties in with the port you'll plug your SSD into. (Credit: Zlata Ivleva) How often will you open it? Most of the M.2 SSD enclosures we tested were made to be opened once, have a drive installed inside and then screwed closed for the long haul. While you can reopen all of them and change drives at any time, you should consider an enclosure with a tool-less design if you think you’ll be changing the drive frequently.

The XS2000 is a great choice as a general-purpose ultraportable drive, as long as you don't need frills like hardware-based data encryption. Our only caveat? Take what we always say about how easy it is to accidentally lose a portable SSD, and double it. If none of the drives we've selected for this roundup sounds appealing to you (or you already own an extra internal SSD), there's one more option available: SSD enclosures. These are plastic or metal housings into which you can put your own SATA 2.5-inch or M.2 solid-state drive to take with you on the go.Increased Storage Space: An SSD caddy allows you to add an additional SSD to your laptop, providing more storage space for your files, music, photos, and other data. This is one of the most performant 10 Gbps enclosures and one of the most convenient, thanks to a tool-free design that allows you to slip the cover off by pressing a spring-loaded switch. It's a few dollars more than the Sabrent EC-SNVE at present and we prefer that enclosure's flip-up lid to the Plugble's slide-out one.

RUGGEDIZATION. The degree of ruggedness does vary from drive to drive, with drives like the ADATA SE800 leading the field at the moment among mainstream-price external SSDs. IP68 certification is a good spec to look for if you're serious about waterproof and dustproof drives. (Credit: Zlata Ivleva) If you want an SSD enclosure with some RGB bling and a swanky sci-fi design, Asus’s ROG Strix Arion is for you. The M.2 NVMe enclosure has two RGB lights, an illuminated ROG logo on the top and a small plastic fin on the side. These show a pleasing pink and purplish light show which Asus markets as being part of its “Aura Sync” RGB ecosystem. However, there doesn’t seem to be any way to actually control the lights as the Asus Armoury Crate software we tested with did not recognize the drive.I also have a couple Orico drives with fans, but those are just overkill and mostly for show. They do work, just big and require tools to swap drives. 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). Generally, the higher a drive's capacity, the cheaper it will be per gigabyte. But that's not always true; sometimes the very highest-capacity drives come at a per-gigabyte price premium. The basement for budget external SSDs is currently about 7 cents per gigabyte, mostly from second- or third-tier vendors. Calculate your bottom-line price when comparing a host of drives. Our typical benchmark-test results for even run-of-the-mill external SSDs show speeds in excess of 400MBps. Practically speaking, this means you can move gigabytes of data (say, a 4GB feature film, or a year's worth of family photos) to your external SSD in seconds rather than the minutes it would take with an external hard drive. (Credit: Zlata Ivleva) External SSDs are now readily available and cheaper than they were a few years ago, but it will probably be a while before they are a complete replacement for hard drives. Physically larger external drives designed to stay on your desk or in a server closet still mostly use 3.5-inch platter drives inside, taking advantage of their vast capacities and much lower prices per gigabyte compared with SSDs.

On a few M.2 enclosures, including the SSK SHE-C325, we found that our test Kingston Rage Fury SSD’s built-in graphene heat spreader, which adds 3.5mm of z height to the drive, didn’t leave much vertical clearance. However, the SHE-C325 could close anyway, without scraping the drive’s surface. Considering that many M.2 SSDs have built-in, non-removable heat spreaders, every enclosure should accommodate them.

Alas, there are enough different flavors of USB to make your head spin—made worse by the confusing nomenclature surrounding USB these days. For example, today's USB 3.2 standard is for all intents and purposes identical to USB 3.1, simply renamed. (It gets even more confusing with the latest kind of USB: The forthcoming USB4 will absorb Thunderbolt.) That said, you'll still see older USB terminology on your PC or Mac and on many SSDs, so you need to know what term correlates to what. How fast? Enclosures can only handle as much speed as their USB ports and the USB ports on your computer allow. Most 2.5-inch and 3.5-inch hard drive / SSD enclosures operate under standard 5 Gbps USB (USB 3 / 3.1 or 3.2 Gen 1). Most M.2 SSD enclosures operate at 10 Gbps (aka USB 3.1 or USB 3.2 Gen 2). Cloned the HDD twice to minimize errors but no help I doubt it is because of the cloning process and if it is it is because the HDD and SSD were not the same size 1000gb and 1000gb and the partitions don't match or so...?