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I have to make a confession – I may have been a bit harsh on the review I wrote three years ago. I only gave three stars to the product I am excitedly writing about today.
The Lexar SL200, I wrote at the time, is a “OK product and that’s about it. It lacks a clear edge compared to almost everything else in the market and its premium price isn’t helping it at all.”
Well, fast forward almost three years and the price of the 2TB version SL200 has dropped by 70% since its launch back in June 2021, almost a year after my review. That alone means I should review the drive again and add at least one star to the review.
At $89.99, it’s the cheapest 2TB portable SSD anywhere right now. It’s still far more expensive than a standard portable hard disk drive of similar capacity, but let’s not forget why an external SSD is the better long-term solution for storing your data, files, and folders.
✅ fast It’s one of the slowest external SSDs we’ve ever tested but it’s still up to 3 times faster than most portable hard disk drives.
✅ Works with Smartphones A little-advertised feature is that most new portable SSDs have a native Type-C connector that can be plugged into any recent smartphone and used as storage for your portable device.
✅ Stronger Because there are no moving parts, the SL200 is a bit more rugged than any external consumer hard drive. It should survive a fall on a hard surface of a few feet.
✅ small The SL200 is smaller than any 2.5-inch hard drive we’ve seen and, by extension, smaller than any portable hard disk drive. For once, you can easily keep it in your back jeans pocket.
✅ 3 Years Warranty Lexar offers a three-year warranty on its SSDs which is 3x what Seagate and WD offer for portable hard disk drives. Again, this is due to the fact that mechanical parts fail more often than electronics.
Is portable HDD slower than external SSD?
Yes. I can’t think of any scenario where this wouldn’t be the case and just to confirm, we’re talking about portable hard drives (the ones that can be carried around, smaller than desktop or external hard drives) cousin). Hard drives are slow because they are mechanical; Data is stored on physical platters and accessed via a head located on an arm; Similar to turntable reading vinyl.
Your average external HDD such as the Seagate Backup Plus has a throughput of 140MBps, meaning it can transfer data up to that speed. The slowest external SSD we’ve tested will hit around 450MBps (and that’s the SL200), which is about 3X the speed.
So a folder that would take about three minutes to transfer on a portable hard drive will take less than a minute on even the slowest portable SSD.
Can an internal SSD be used as a portable SSD drive?
The answer is – surprisingly – yes. See An internal SSD is a bunch of components inside a casing (either plastic or metal), an enclosure that actually protects the electronics inside. Unless you want to physically hide the drive for whatever reason or make it more aesthetically pleasing, protecting it with an external case is redundant.
Just remember that they’re no match for the best secure drives or best robust drives because they lack additional security that would either prevent third parties from accessing the actual NAND chips or improve their adaptability to harsh environments.
SATA SSD drives are the cheapest solid state drives so if you want the cheapest external SSD, all you need to do is get an internal SATA SSD and connect it to an external connector like the Sabrent EC-SSHD et voila! Even accounting for the cost of the latter (around $12), at the time of writing, you’re looking at a savings of around 20%. Every little thing helps.
The larger the drive, the wider the gap; An 8TB SSD costs about $430 (Samsung 870 QVO at Amazon), while a comparable portable model costs about $200 more (VectoTech Rapid).
Note that you can’t do this with a PCIe NVMe internal SSD because its components are actually exposed. You will need to put the module in an external enclosure before being able to use it. They’re not that expensive (about twice the price of an EC-SSHD) and have the advantage of using USB 3.2 Gen 2, which provides speeds of up to 10Gbps, more than enough for a PCIe SSD that is typically faster than SATA SSDs. They are fast.
I have to make a confession – I may have been a bit harsh on the review I wrote three years ago. I only gave three stars to the product I am excitedly writing about today.
The Lexar SL200, I wrote at the time, is a “OK product and that’s about it. It lacks a clear edge compared to almost everything else in the market and its premium price isn’t helping it at all.”
Well, fast forward almost three years and the price of the 2TB version SL200 has dropped by 70% since its launch back in June 2021, almost a year after my review. That alone means I should review the drive again and add at least one star to the review.
At $89.99, it’s the cheapest 2TB portable SSD anywhere right now. It’s still far more expensive than a standard portable hard disk drive of similar capacity, but let’s not forget why an external SSD is the better long-term solution for storing your data, files, and folders.
✅ fast It’s one of the slowest external SSDs we’ve ever tested but it’s still up to 3 times faster than most portable hard disk drives.
✅ Works with Smartphones A little-advertised feature is that most new portable SSDs have a native Type-C connector that can be plugged into any recent smartphone and used as storage for your portable device.
✅ Stronger Because there are no moving parts, the SL200 is a bit more rugged than any external consumer hard drive. It should survive a fall on a hard surface of a few feet.
✅ small The SL200 is smaller than any 2.5-inch hard drive we’ve seen and, by extension, smaller than any portable hard disk drive. For once, you can easily keep it in your back jeans pocket.
✅ 3 Years Warranty Lexar offers a three-year warranty on its SSDs which is 3x what Seagate and WD offer for portable hard disk drives. Again, this is due to the fact that mechanical parts fail more often than electronics.
Is portable HDD slower than external SSD?
Yes. I can’t think of any scenario where this wouldn’t be the case and just to confirm, we’re talking about portable hard drives (the ones that can be carried around, smaller than desktop or external hard drives) cousin). Hard drives are slow because they are mechanical; Data is stored on physical platters and accessed via a head located on an arm; Similar to turntable reading vinyl.
Your average external HDD such as the Seagate Backup Plus has a throughput of 140MBps, meaning it can transfer data up to that speed. The slowest external SSD we’ve tested will hit around 450MBps (and that’s the SL200), which is about 3X the speed.
So a folder that would take about three minutes to transfer on a portable hard drive will take less than a minute on even the slowest portable SSD.
Can an internal SSD be used as a portable SSD drive?
The answer is – surprisingly – yes. See An internal SSD is a bunch of components inside a casing (either plastic or metal), an enclosure that actually protects the electronics inside. Unless you want to physically hide the drive for whatever reason or make it more aesthetically pleasing, protecting it with an external case is redundant.
Just remember that they’re no match for the best secure drives or best robust drives because they lack additional security that would either prevent third parties from accessing the actual NAND chips or improve their adaptability to harsh environments.
SATA SSD drives are the cheapest solid state drives so if you want the cheapest external SSD, all you need to do is get an internal SATA SSD and connect it to an external connector like the Sabrent EC-SSHD et voila! Even accounting for the cost of the latter (around $12), at the time of writing, you’re looking at a savings of around 20%. Every little thing helps.
The larger the drive, the wider the gap; An 8TB SSD costs about $430 (Samsung 870 QVO at Amazon), while a comparable portable model costs about $200 more (VectoTech Rapid).
Note that you can’t do this with a PCIe NVMe internal SSD because its components are actually exposed. You will need to put the module in an external enclosure before being able to use it. They’re not that expensive (about twice the price of an EC-SSHD) and have the advantage of using USB 3.2 Gen 2, which provides speeds of up to 10Gbps, more than enough for a PCIe SSD that is typically faster than SATA SSDs. They are fast.
