Portable SSD

Hi All - Hoping this hasn't been asked before. 
I am on the lookout for a Portable SSD and am wondering if anyone has any recommendations?

Thanks in advance.

I normally buy a USB 3 enclosure then get a drive to put in it rather than to buy a packaged drive.

One of these, http://www.amazon.com/Tool-free-Inateck ... losure+2.5

And a Samsung EVO SSD of your, liking. Prices have really started falling. In fact my last SSD, 840 series, came with a USB-SATA cable.

Thanks Neil, I will look into that.

SSD drives still aren't up to the capacity that I would like for a portable drive. I recently bought a WD 2TB drive for about $120 from Best Buy. I don't think you can get an SSD with more capacity that 1TB right now.

I use a 250GB USB stick made by Patriot for on-the-road image storage and backup - they are about $175 and I have 2 for redundancy and the ability to back-up in triplicate on legacy media. I still use higher capacity legacy drives also to store larger amounts / redundant data when on the road. As others have indicated the cost of larger capacity SSD drives is still many times the cost of legacy drives and 1TB is the cap - around $500 for 1TB, and it's still a possible single point of failure if you don't have two. In comparison you can get 2TB legacy drives ready to go for under $100 each.

Thanks for the info Greg, the 250GB USB stick sound like a very handy on the road piece of kit to have.

I had a Patriot "Magnum" 128 GB USB 3 stick awhile back; it was the largest & fastest I could get at the time. My intent was to evaluate it for this kind of use -- quick, compact, low-power, portable backup storage from a small laptop. The speed wasn't blinding, certainly much slower than any of the current good SSD's would offer. But it was minimally acceptable.

Unfortunately, the Patriot stick bricked itself at one point. I was copying a bunch of images onto it from the laptop, and the copy aborted with an error. I safe ejected the stick, plugged it back in, and it was completely dead.

The sticks are comparatively tiny, though, even compared to small portable SSD's. So in theory you could travel with a pack of sticks for space & redundancy, as long as you have time to update the copies on them all.

So far I'm not using high capacity sticks or portable SSD's, I'm sticking with spinning drives (currently 2 TB WD models). When SSD price/performance improves some more, I will probably introduce a couple of them to my portable set. 1 TB capacity is okay for now, I wouldn't shoot more than that on a single trip. But at ~$490 CDN for a Samsung 840 EVO 1 TB, or $540 CDN for a Crucal M550 1 TB, plus external cases, doing 2 or 3 of those is still a bit spendy for me.

I've been using two Patriot 256GB sticks for several years now.

Just done a quick test with 10GB of RAW files. An 800x sandisk 64GB cfcard copies to My Passport HDD(WD) at between 95-101MBs. Same files and card copy to a Samsung 840 256SSD in Anker housing at 92-95MBs.... both NTFS. Copied on my Surface Pro 3 via powered hub.

So my idea of using SSDs to backup files just got scuppered. Cos disks are cheap.

Those results are a bit surprising, or ?
That the card can only be read at ~100MB/s, is probably already pretty good. But I would have expected an SSD plus USB3 combo to do significantly better (as much as a factor of 5, to perhaps get 500MB/s).
So where do you think the bottleneck is ?

I will have to do the same test on my PC, could be the Surface is the bottle neck, or the USB housing. I won't get more than 120MBs from the card anyway. Think it

I'm getting the following:
470MB/sec on a SATA 3 (6Gb) connected Samsung 850 Pro SSD
455MB/sec on a SATA 3 (6Gb) connected Crucial 256GB SSD
271MB/sec on a USB3 Patriot memory stick
155MB/sec on a Lexar 1000x CF card on a USB3 card reader

So there is definitely something throttling your performance pretty substantially

But I am copying from a 120MBs CF card, 800x, Sandisk extreme so I figured 100MBs was pretty good copying to a HDD?

Just tried the same card on my PC, Lexar USB3 reader to my Samsung SSD Windows drive, 103MBs. To HDD Sata 3, 98-100 MBs. From Sata3 drive to Windows SSD, 80ish MBs. I need to try Surface SSD to SSD USB3.

Neilyb wrote:But I am copying from a 120MBs CF card, 800x, Sandisk extreme so I figured 100MBs was pretty good copying to a HDD?

Ah OK, yes your transfer rate is limited by the card.

External SSD to Surface SSD = average 200 MBs.

External WD HDD to Surface SSD = 58MBs

Which has me really confused now, as through the hub I was getting better speeds from the HDD?

Did find a 7200 RPM 2.5" HGST for the same price as a WD 5400 RPM equivalent. But the reviews on Amazon seem to be very mixed comapred to other drives. Plus the WD My Passport (which includes the housing) costs 3€ more than the bare disk.

For portable drives I find it so much cheaper and easier to buy pre-made WD drives in 2TB capacity and be sure to always always have at least 2 copies. Once I dropped 2 of these at the same time and bricked them both. That is why I now use the patriots (can drop them) and then WD drives for an additional copy.

I just had a client loose all his images from a 2 week trip to the Falklands because their bag was stolen. If you travel do not keep all your images in one bag and, if you can, carry a copy on your person at all times.

The girlfriend once had her bag stolen in Amsterdam, stupidly he had lefther hard disk and cards in that bag. I never travel with both backups together.