I've been keeping my eye out for any decent Prime Day stragglers—great PC gear that was on sale during Prime Day and has still kept hold of that discount. I reckon I've found one here with the SanDisk Extreme Pro. It's not quite as cheap as it was during Prime Day, but it's still $20 cheaper than it's been for most of its shelf life so far now it's $260 at Amazon.
External SSDs aren't exactly the flashiest bits of kit, but they can come in very handy for a number of things, and this particular one is the fastest I've tested—and I've tried my fair share of portable drives over the past year.
This is a USB4 40 Gbps drive, which is why you're seeing a $250+ price tag for 2 TB of storage. But if you have the USB port to make use of it (as most new laptops and PCs should) then you'll see the benefit in both transfer speed and general performance.
This was made abundantly clear in my testing, which showed not only that the drive attains peak transfer speeds of 3,700+ MB/s, but also that these speeds are sustained pretty consistently. You get about two minutes worth of transferring at this speed, then a couple of minutes at 2,000 MB/s, and then back and forth they go.
In real-world terms, that means you should be able to transfer about 450 GB/s of data in just two minutes. That should cover most uses cases, I reckon (and if not, well, 2,000 MB/s for the next couple of minutes isn't half bad, either).
USB4 external SSDs had been filtering through, in drips and drabs, for a little while, but I'd not seen seen one capable of maintaining speeds like this—and at pretty low temperatures, too. This is simply the first external drive I've tried that can manage such fast speed and overall performance consistently.
By "overall performance" I mean the SSD's RND4k performance, which was much better than any other drive I've tested. Ultimately, this translates to low latency and fewer issues when running apps and games from the drive, so if you're looking to use it as a gaming library, you're in luck.
There's little else to it than that—it's simply the best external SSD I've tested from a pure speed perspective. It helps that it looks and feels rather premium, too, even if it is phone-sized (so pocketable, but not exactly keychain material). For $20 off its usual sale price, it's well worth a post-Prime punt if you're in the market for some extra storage.
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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