what do you call external usb drives that are not flash drives?

[oduodui]

what do you call usb drives that are not usb thumb drives that are ssd's but that you dont use as a hardrive for an operating system necessarily ?

i am just looking for an external usb ssd that gives a lot of storage like 1 terabyte or 2 terabyte.

i am unable to find ssd like that her in South Africa. its as if every pc store i go to suddenly don't know what i am talking about. they either don't stock it or just say they they don't know what you are talking about.


thanks

[TreeTops]

Amazon has many External Solid State Drives for sale.

[oduodui]

ah thanks external solid state drives now i know what to call them . one that connects via usb ....2.0 at least

[jagabo]

No, you want USB 3. USB 2 is slower than normal hard drives at sequential transfer.

[johnmeyer]

In the 1-2 TB storage size, expect to pay a LOT more for SSD drives.

Also, as others have said, if you want to get the most from the increased read speed that SSDs offer, you need to have a computer (and drive) which support USB 3.0, not USB 2.0.

[drjtech]

If you just want lots of external storage on a USB 2.0 system then 2 TB and larger external hard drives are much less expensive than SSD.

[jagabo]

Anyone looking for an external SSD must be buying it for the speed. The OP may be confusing USB 2.0's theoretical 480 Mb/s with the typical SSD speed of ~500 MB/s. USB speed is measured in mega bits per second, drive speed in mega bytes per second -- an 8 fold difference. In addition, USB 2.0 has a lot of overhead so its 480 Mb/s (60 MB/s) only delivers about 30 MB/s in the real world. Either that or he has an unusual use case which consists of only small random read/writes where IOPS is more important than continuous throughput.

[lingyi]

I've been rallying against buying premade external drives (unless they're cheaper than an internal) for years, because of my and others experiencing failure of the USB interface. Better to get a high quality external case and make your own.

Also, as mentioned, the speed advantage of a SSD is usually lost even on USB 3.0 since the real world transfer speed is far below the theoretical bandwidth of the interface, especially on large/sustained reads/writes. I get ~200Mb/s (small files) and ~160MB/s (large files) max over USB 3.0 with a HDD when transferring between drives. Thunderbolt would increase the transfer speed, but again still far below what the max of any drive is.