I’ve reviewed external storage for a decade; this is the best portable SSD for freelancers right now
Seagate strikes the right balance with the One Touch SSD range.
Note that Seagate has now changed what it is offering with its SSD. Instead of 4 months Adobe Creative Cloud Photography plan, the new offer is 6-month Dropbox Backup Plan and instead of one-year Mylio Create, the new offer is 6-month Mylio Photos subscription.
Amazon sells the Seagate One Touch 1TB external SSD for $89.99, a saving of 47% from its original selling price of $169.99 (at the time of writing, prices may vary depending when you're reading this article).
While this is not the cheapest 1TB on the market, I think it is one of the best portable SSD (if not the best) for freelancers, especially creative ones, and for a number of reasons.
Thanks to its USB 3.2 Gen 2 connector, it is one of the fastest external solid state drives in its category (under $100), matching the likes of the Samsung T7 or the Crucial X8 with an up-to-read speed of 1.05GBps. Such a fast speed means that you can move files around easily and you can even work directly from the drive if you have compatible portable apps.
A 2TB version is available if you need something bigger for just $149.99 (you will need to select Other Sellers on Amazon to get this price). A smaller 500GB version is also available but at $69.99, it’s not recommended.
This drive is also ridiculously small and portable (a mere 70 x 50 x 10mm and weighing 43g) which means that you can easily carry it around to keep all your movies, photos, and more in one place. You get both USB Type-C and Type-A cables for out-of-the-box compatibility with Windows, Mac, and Android - we’d just wish that they were a tad longer.
Where it pips the competition is when it comes to what’s included in the package; other than the standard 3-year warranty, Seagate throws in free data recovery services as well, a life saver if your SSD has been damaged and you can’t access, say, your clients’ files. Now terms and conditions will apply and there’s a 10% chance of failure but it’s good to know that it exists as a safety net.
Also included is a six-month subscription to Mylio Photos+, the premium plan for Mylio Photos, which allows you to organize, share, and protect all your photos and videos on all your devices, including your storage drives. (Adding a cloud-storage service is 100% optional.) An annual Mylio Photos+ subscription costs $99.99, which is $10 more than the price of the drive itself.
But there’s even more; Seagate threw in a four-month subscription to Adobe’s uber-popular Creative Cloud Photography Plan, which is worth $39.96 by itself. We haven’t tried but you should be able to redeem it even if you already have an existing account.
Last but certainly not least, Seagate DiscWizard, one of the best free backup software designed exclusively for Seagate hardware, and the Seagate SSD Touch app, which lets you manage files stored on compatible Seagate devices using your Android mobile device.
Users can also redeem a free 90-day subscription to Amazon Music unlimited, worth more than $30, for new Non-Prime members. Check out our review of the Seagate One Touch 1TB external SSD where the device received a superb 4.5 stars out of five.
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Désiré has been musing and writing about technology during a career spanning four decades. He dabbled in website builders and web hosting when DHTML and frames were in vogue and started narrating about the impact of technology on society just before the start of the Y2K hysteria at the turn of the last millennium.