Don’t Skimp On Storage—Here’s the Highest Rated Hardware

October 28, 2015

By Greg Scoblete

EDITOR’S CHOICE: SanDisk Extreme 900 SSD  

SanDisk is no stranger to SSDs, but the 900 series is the company’s first portable, external SSD drive. It can connect using either the new USB Type C connection or a traditional USB plug to deliver rapid file transfers at 850 MB/s. The SSD is housed in a rugged aluminum case and comes in 480GB, 960GB and 1.9TB capacities. At $1,000 the 1.9TB drive has one of the best price-to-capacity ratios we’ve seen in portable SSDs.

Prices: $400-$1,000

G-Technology G-Drive ev ATC

The G-Drive ev ATC can take whatever nature (or you) throws at it. Toss it in water and it floats. Drop it from up to six feet in the air and it survives the impact. Dump a shovel-full of dust on it—no problem. The ev ATC is available in Thunderbolt and USB 3.0 versions. All the drives are formatted for Mac out-of-the-box but can be reformatted for Windows use.

PRICES: $150 (1TB, USB 3.0), $195 (1TB, THUNDERBOLT) 

WD My Cloud EX4100 

With the EX4100, you can build your own personal cloud with up to 24 TB-worth of storage. This network attached storage (NAS) drive uses a 1.6GHz dual-core processor to keep data transfers humming at 116 MB/s (uploads and downloads). It has several RAID configurations depending on the number of drives you use and it can connect to more than one power source, such as an outlet and battery backup, to keep the drive alive even when the power dies.

PRICES: $400-$1,450

LaCie Rugged RAID SSD 

LaCie’s 1TB Rugged RAID measures in at the same size and weight as the 500GB version with transfer speeds up to 387 MB/s when connected via Thunderbolt. A USB 3.0 port is also available. You can drop the Rugged RAID from up to 6.6 feet in the air without damaging its digital contents. It’s also water- and dust-resistant. The drive ships with software for encrypting the entire drive or only select
volumes with AES 256-bit encryption.

PRICE: $950

Samsung T1 SSD

This slender solid state drive (SSD) crams up to a full terabyte into a minuscule enclosure that’s just about the size of a business card—2.8 x 2.1 x 4 inches. It boasts transfer speeds up to 450 MB/s and employs AES 256 encryption and password protection to keep files secure. It’s available in capacities ranging from 250 GB to 1 TB.

PRICES: $150-$500