What is a portable hard drive? A portable hard drive is a lightweight, high-capacity external storage drive (similar to a beefier USB flash drive) that connects to our computers, TVs, and other devices to expand their storage (or more commonly copy large files between devices).

Features of Portable Hard Drives

• Portable Design: Slim and lightweight for easy carrying, even more compact than older external mechanical hard drives.
• Massive Storage Space: Commonly seen capacities are between 500GB and 16TB, easily holding files like high-definition videos, big software, and photo collections.
• Universal Compatibility: Most use USB interface and work with main operating systems (Windows and Mac), with plug and play usage (mostly minimal setup required).
  Lets you use your system on the go. Particularly good for supporting the videos we’re so hungry for.

Common Types of Portable Hard Drives

• Mechanical Portable Hard Drive (HDD): Large capacity, low price, but poor shock resistance and moderate read/write speeds.
• Solid-State Portable Drive (SSD): Fast read/write speeds, excellent shock resistance, and more compact size, but higher price for the same capacity.

Sequential read/write speeds are only 100–200 MB/s, with slow random read/write performance (approximately 100–200 IOPS). Multitasking often results in lag.

Sequential read/write speeds reach 500–7000 MB/s (NVMe protocol), with outstanding random read/write performance (IOPS exceeding 100,000), enabling extremely fast system boot-up and file transfers.

A portable hard drive is a device for storing data. It is suitable for large-capacity storage, easy to carry, and plug-and-play. Portable hard drives are the mainstream tools for future large-capacity storage.