External SSDs

Keep your important files safe with an external SSD.

External SSDs

Crucial Portable SSDs

 

Whether you're backing up movies, games, or photos, our portable SSDs provide peace of mind with up to 8TB2 of storage. Our external SSDs offer blazing speeds reaching up to 2,100MB/s1, allowing you to safely store and access your files wherever you go.  

 

Looking for a different form factor? Check out our NVMe SSD and SATA SSD ranges. Need more reliability for mission-critical tasks and applications? Elevate your data center’s performance and endurance with our Micron Server SSDs—engineered for the most demanding workloads. 


An external solid state drive (SSD) is a portable storage device that uses flash memory to store data. External SSDs are also known as portable SSDs and offer fast data transfer speeds and durability, making them ideal for tasks requiring quick access to files. External SSDs are often used for backups, media storage, and running applications on-the-go. For more information, read our article: What is a portable SSD?

An external SSD is ideal for anyone in need of fast, portable storage for tasks like video editing, file transfers, or gaming. External SSDs offer speed and durability to make them suitable for professionals, gamers, students and creatives. However, if you're looking for more speed, an NVMe SSD may be best for you. Alternatively, SATA SSDs are best for general use where speed is less critical, balancing performance with affordability and compatibility instead. For more information on how to choose the right external SSD, read our article on choosing an external SSD for a laptop.

Unlike most external SSDs, Crucial portables like the X10 Pro Portable SSD feature high sustained write speeds, which means that speeds remain fast throughout the drive’s full capacity. This can significantly improve productivity for users who choose the X10 Pro instead of a drive where write speeds drastically slow down as the drive fills up. 

External SSDs offer fast data transfer speeds, increased durability due to no moving parts, and overall better performance for tasks like booting up systems or running applications. There are advantages and disadvantages to each type of drive, and deciding on which type is right for you comes down to how you use your computer. Our guide on HDD vs. SSD shows how each type of storage drive works and how they can help you. 

Consider your storage needs, including the size of files you'll be working with and how much space your system requires. For photos, at an average file size of 5MB, a 1TB SSD holds about 200,000 images. For video, an hour of 4K footage could take up anywhere from 42GB to over 740GB. Our most popular capacities for external SSDs are the 2TB and 4TB. 

Not sure if our products are right for your computer? Try our System Scanner or Upgrade Selector.


¹MB/s speed measured by Crucial as maximum sequential performance of device on a high-performance desktop computer with Crystal Disk Mark (version 8.0.4 for x64). Your performance may vary.
²Some of the storage capacity is used for formatting and other purposes and is not available for data storage. 1GB equals 1 billion bytes.