Practically speaking, this means you can move gigabytes of data (say, a 4GB feature-length film, or a year's worth of family photos) to an external SSD in seconds rather than the minutes it would take with an external spinning drive.
External SSDs offer at least twice that speed and sometimes much more, with typical results on our benchmark tests in excess of 400MBps. Just how much faster is it to access data stored in flash cells? Typical read and write speeds for consumer drives with spinning platters are in the 100MBps to 200MBps range, depending on platter densities and whether they spin at 5,400rpm (more common) or 7,200rpm (less common). Unlike a conventional disk-based hard drive, which stores data on a spinning platter or platters accessed by a moving magnetic head, an SSD uses a collection of flash cells-similar to the ones that make up a computer's RAM-to save data. Solid-state drives (SSDs) have fewer moving parts than traditional hard drives, and they offer the speediest access to your data. Hard drives may get you more capacity for your dollar by far, but first you need to consider a major difference in external storage these days: the hard drive versus the SSD. Weighing the Need for Speed: Hard Drive or SSD? This guide will help you make sense of all these and many more questions that arise while you're shopping for an external hard drive.
