Solid State Flash is  slowly replacing hard disks in  external storage --  but there's a price to pay -- literally!
By Anand Parthasarathy
Bangalore,February 4 2019: Most of the new generation  Netbooks and slim laptops  launched last year,  used  solid state drives (SSD)  based on the same Flash  storage that you find in USB sticks and  phone micro SD cards. The advantage is  a much-reduced size and weight plus superior data transfer speeds.  Now SSD technology is increasingly offered as an alternative to hard disks in external  portable storage devices -- and they bring the same twin advantages of superior speed and reduced footprint, but at what is at present, a stiff price.
 We have been trying out  WD's  My Passport  SSD range of external   drives  and the shrink in size compared to a hard drive of equivalent capacity is dramatic. The 256 GB size is  only slightly bigger than an ATM card  -- and a centimetre thick.  It comes with a Type C connector socket   to the latest USB3.1 standard and if your companion device is also Type see, a transfer at  540 MBPS is promised. The cable provided, has an adapter so that you can still connect the older Type A   devices and  is backward compatible to  USB 2.0 standard. This will degrade the transfer speed, though.
WD  has built-in software for AES data encryption  and  file back up.My Passport SSD is a very handy  piece of hardware if you are on the move and need to quickly  transfer or backup  files from camera,  laptop etc. There is some variation between MRP and the asking price  of the 4 capacities  and these seem to be the best prices:  256 GB ( Rs 12,000), 512 GB ( Rs 14300), 1 TB ( Rs 39,000 - 40,000) and  2 TB (Rs 47, 200). You must really need the superior speed and the compactness --  otherwise  you must forget that  a HDD-based  2 TB drive costs just  Rs 6000. The price gap will narrow,but not any time soon.