However, while you might think that the lowest-cost drive provides the most value, it often doesn’t. Capacity and priceįor most consumers, the main shopping concerns for external storage are capacity and price. Yes, USB4 will provide the same massive throughput as Thunderbolt 3 (with more possibly to come), though without some of the latter’s features, such as daisy-chaining. What you need to know before you buy USB Forum
See the full review of the Portable SSD X5 on our sister site Macworld. Or you may simply soon see USB4 drives with the same 40Gbps transfer rates. The advent of USB4 should alleviate this, but only if vendors decide to combine it with the superset technology that is Thunderbolt 4. The only reason we don’t universally recommend the Portable SSD X5 is the relative rarity of Thunderbolt 3/4 ports on PCs.
As an NVMe SSD using PCIe over a cable (that’s basically what Thunderbolt 3 is), it’s stupidly fast-over 2.5GBps reading and writing. If you have Thunderbolt 3 or 4 on your system, you owe it to yourself to check out a portable Thunderbolt 3 drive such as Samsung’s Portable SSD X5.
