Having an external SSD is highly convenient when traveling, and as I started going back to events in 2025, I collated all the drives I have to see which would be best. There's been a steady rise in stick SSD drives in recent years; I used SK Hynix's Tube T31 last year, and it was pretty great — while it looks identical a regular USB drive, it houses an SSD inside, and is able to deliver 1000MB/s transfers.
But the drive I ended up using the most over the course of 2025 is TeamGroup's X1 Max. TeamGroup debuted the drive in Q2 2024, and the SSD is now available globally. The base 256GB model costs $28 on Amazon, and the 512GB variant is $53 as of writing. The model I tested is the 1TB version, and that's available for $73 on Amazon. By contrast, Samsung's T7 Portable — the best-selling external SSD by some margin — costs $99.
