The best SSDs and hard drives 2021 Top portable external drives for your Mac or PC

With more laptops and devices being equipped with flash memory, that often means it becomes too expensive to get a good amount of storage built-in.

And, with so many more of us travelling around for work, working from home or needing to use more than one machine, it’s more important than ever to have an external drive of sorts.

Thankfully, there’s a lot of them around. And most of the portable options are small enough to go in a pocket. 

SSD (solid-state) drives like these are preferable to HDD (more traditional style hard-drives) with the former being a bit more expensive, but also faster, smaller and more portable. They’re also more likely to last you a long time because there are no moving parts. For editing movies and photos on an external drive, nothing really gets the job done like an SSD.

SSD vs HDD: What’s the difference between flash storage and traditional hard drives

We’ve tested each of the following, using each of them to edit 4K video footage in Final Cut Pro, keeping the original files on the external drive, and each of them performed really well, with no real frame-drop issues, slow export or render times. So, regardless of which of the following you get, you’ll enjoy the speediness and efficiency. 

Judging them based on portability, design, performance and value for money, here are our top picks.

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