The best USB4 external SSD, and my own personal favorite out of the many I've tested over the last year or so, is now on sale at its lowest ever price for $238 at Amazon. External SSDs aren't the flashiest pieces of kit, but they can come in handy, and I reckon this is the best shout for such a drive right now if you have a USB4 port to make use of it.
We're at a point where USB4 SSDs are starting to become a little more mainstream. Back when I tested and reviewed the USB4 version of the SanDisk Extreme Pro, I scored it an impressive 92% but I was keen to remind everyone that this is only a drive that's worth buying if you have a USB4 port.
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Well, I reckon by now a lot more people will have such speedy ports, especially with the newest generation of gaming PCs and laptops flooding the market. If you have such a USB port, an external SSD like this one can make deft use of it with speeds of up to 3,800 MB/s.
We had external SSDs capable of these speeds before, such as with the Adata SE920, but the internals meant that, despite any mitigating cooling, such drives would overheat and not maintain their peak transfer speeds for very long. Not so with the SanDisk Extreme Pro.
In my testing, the Extreme Pro hit over 3,700 MB/s for about two minutes straight, netting a transfer of about 450 GB. Of course, whether it will achieve these results in real-world transfers is a different story, because much depends on the size of the individual files being transferred. But that it's capable of such peak transfers for a sustained period of time is truly impressive.
It's especially impressive because it's not exactly a big, heavily-cooled external SSD. It's more like a flat, phone-sized puck. It's great to slap on the desk and it even has a hoop to attach to a keychain or to lock to your bag or laptop if you're worried about it being grabbed.
Gaming performance is great, too, as demonstrated not only by its 3DMark Storage score but also by its RND4k performance. This means it'll be great for general usage, too, such as running applications from the drive. It'll also make a good game library drive to store and run your Steam games from.
I've personally used this drive for tons of different tasks, from big backup transfers to running games from it, and it's still my favorite external SSD to this day. If you think you might need some additional external storage in future, for its current October Prime Day price, I'd pick this one up in a heartbeat.
Check out all of Amazon's external SSD deals here.
1. Best overall: Adata SD810
2. Best budget: Crucial X9
3. Best for video editing: Samsung T9
4. Best USB4: Sandisk Extreme Pro
5. Best thumb drive replacement: Seagate Ultra Compact
6. Best durable drive: LaCie Rugged Pro 5
7. Best budget durable: Samsung T7 Shield
8. Best for backups: SanDisk Desk Drive
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