Video: The price of solid state drives has been on a steady decline for the last year, and they’re already a top pick for easily improving the performance of your laptop, desktop or even your PS4. But they also make really fantastic external drives — if more expensive than a traditional hard drive.
The reason? SSDs have zero moving parts inside. A traditional hard drive features a spinning disk that data is written to. And just like your old Discman, that disk stops when the hard drive is moved too quickly. SSDs don’t have to worry about that so your data is more likely to survive when the drive is dropped, smacked or gently assaulted with a machete.
But you can’t actually know if a drive can survive all that damage unless you wilfully damage it.
Which is why I beat the hell out of Sandisk’s super cool Extreme 510 Portable SSD. How well does an SSD hold up compared to a rugged HDD? We investigate in the video above.