With no real knowledge my guess would be that they both are using usb technology so the access speed would be similar for a usb and a solid state due to the speed restriction of the usb interface. There would be no spin up and seek time so there should be a speed increase vs an motor driven hard drive? Why not replace the internal drive with a solid state. If you have an internal hard drive you will be surprised at the increase in speed you will get from a solid state drive.Sent via Gmail from  David Young youngmdavid@gmail.com

On Wed, Feb 26, 2020 at 9:11 AM ASKC User Forums <forums@askc.org> wrote:

























New Question Posted

Scott Kranz created a new discussion solid state external drives in Off-Topic














Hello,


This is a notification to let you know that Scott Kranz has created new discussion on the site. You may find the snippet of the new discussion below:








ok, I&#39;ve had a another Western Digital external HDD show signs that it is about to crash. Time to move to solid state external drives.



Question: I see that you can get USB thumb drives all the way up to 1TB now. But they also make larger models that are the size of a cell phone and look a lot like the older HDD models.



Is there any difference between the two? Is there an advantage of one over the other? They both use the same technology, don&#39;t they?



Thanks!






Read this discussion















This email was sent to you, because you have subscribed to the discussion.

To unsubscribe, please click here. Manage subscriptions.

Samsung and SanDisk thumb drives have never let me down. My SanDisk and Kingston SSD have been going for years and are still healthy.

I would buy one, but not trust a $15 1t flash drive found on ebay.

David has it right though. They are probably the same flash storage and USB has speed limits. Any new-to-me PC i buy an internal SSD before any other upgrade. From power on, login, to surfing the web in 15 seconds on my desktop is amazing. The machine will be waiting at the login prompt before my monitor gets up to speed.

I have recently upgraded the size of a primary OS drive - I used linux live USB stick to clone the small to the large and was shocked it worked

I use both and have zero issues out of them. one is just easier to carry than the other

Doug Waller

If you do go USB, be sure to get USB 3.0 or higher. It is much faster than USB 2.0. This all assumes you plug into a USB port rated for USB 3 speeds.

I second the notion that you should get USB 3 drives if your computer supports USB3.
Also agree that an internal USB drive that connects directly to the internal bus (whichever you have) is a game-changer for PC performance.

But also, not all external SSD are equally performant. Here's a good recent review (and there are lots of others.)

https://thewirecutter.com/reviews/best-portable-ssd/

--david