Crucial, Kingston, Samsung, Transcend NWD – External Hard Drives

Not only have the prices of the SSDs you put in your computer dropped dramatically recently, but the SSDs you can take with you have also become much cheaper. These compact USB sticks may not be as inexpensive as their internal counterparts, but they are still relevant for backing up or transferring large amounts of data.

Many manufacturers have also thought so in recent months. The reason I’m posting this roundup now in the afternoon is because of the ban from Samsung and their new T9 drives. These versions follow the very popular T7, which in turn replaced the T5 series. But other manufacturers have recently released their own new external drives. From Western Digital we got the WD_Black P40, Crucial recently released the X9 Pro and X10 Pro, and Kingston followed up the XS2000 with the XS1000. We test these drives as well as older external drives that are still available in our SSD testing system. So, those old drives will have to be retested, because we switched to this Z790 system at the beginning of this year.

By the way, many programmers will of course build their own external SSD with an enclosure housing the old NVMe drive. After all, who didn’t buy a good upgrade last year, with SSD prices dropping? Since the number of combinations of an external SSD enclosure and legacy drive you can put in it is of course almost infinite, we’ll largely ignore this category. I connected my Ugreen housing, with a 1TB 970 EVO Plus, to the test system. Ugreen has been on sale a lot lately for less than €20 and the 970 EVO has been one of the most popular drives for a long time.

As for performance in this roundup, we won’t take this “self-build engine” into account. On the next page we will take a quick look at the most important features of the new external SSD drives. Then we delve into the standards.