 Is that an SSD in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me? Actually, it's a bottle of water. If you're gonna stuff yourself, use something that it's at least the right shape. Not square, that's creepy. Cooler Master V-Series semi-modular power supplies feature 80 plus gold efficiency and their gold guarantee five-year warranty. Click now to learn more. Alright, so to move on from that awkward initial joke in as expedient a manner as possible, I'm gonna distract you guys by showing you a close-up of that SSD that I was holding up. This is the Angelbird SSD2Go Pocket. Not to be confused with the SSD2Go Twin that we've checked out before. It features the same gorgeous anodized aluminium housing, the same durable full-size USB-A connector with an included cable, and it comes in your choice of colors. But unfortunately purple is not an option this time, so as long as you like blue, red, silver, or black, then you'll be pretty much good to go. But none of those are the important differences. The big ones are the size and the price. In the last year, SSD pricing has come down a lot. So rather than paying over $900 for a dual 256 gig of the physically much larger Twin product, you can pick up a 512 of the pocket for less than a dollar per gig. It's still very expensive compared to a mechanical hard drive, of course, but not nearly as fragile and much faster. Of course, it's not like hard drives and external SSDs are the only options available though. So let's figure out how this product stacks up against the entire competitive landscape. So representing portable USB 3 drives, I've got the My Passport Edge from Western Digital. So same interface, USB 3, and similar form factor, but this time a mechanical drive. Representing portable Thunderbolt SSDs, which do exist even though I don't have one, is a powered Thunderbolt enclosure with an Intel 730 series SSD Frankensteined inside of it. And finally representing a category that only just emerged, SSD controller based USB 3 drives, we've got the Corsair Voyager GTX 256 gig, a product with similar ruggedness, a slightly lower price, and an even more compact size. So here's what the numbers look like. I'll label these for you so you actually know what you're looking at, by the way. Our Thunderbolt enclosure, this is Thunderbolt 1 by the way, delivers the best performance in sequential writes and large random writes. So copying large files over Thunderbolt to the drive will deliver 10 to 15 percent better performance than our SSD to-go pocket. But then the tables turn and the Angelbird drive pretty much takes over from there. Its sequential and random reads are well over 30% faster and its native UASP support, basically a protocol that's much more efficient for small data transactions over USB 3, lets it just wreck the other solutions when it comes to 4k, so small data, random write performance, especially as we increase the queue depth. Now to be clear, this type of performance is mostly not impactful unless you're running an OS or a database on the drive or something. But I'm not going to say no to this kind of performance if it isn't going to cost me extra. Which leads us into analysis time. If we compare to the Thunderbolt solution, something that has a similar per gigabyte cost, then I guess it isn't costing us extra, so it becomes a very obvious choice to go for the Angelbird. But when we compare to something else, things get a little bit muddier. A strong argument can be made for the Voyager GTX. It's smaller and less expensive, but it's not a perfect product either. My keyring broke off, making the size a bit of a disadvantage in some ways, since I'm very likely to lose it now, and its performance, while very impressive for a thumb drive, is not as good as the SSD to go pocket. And then of course, hard drives are just so darn cheap. Even the My Passport Air, chosen for its similar all-metal industrial design, can be had for 65 bucks for a 500 gig model. But of course, I wouldn't do that drop test on a drive like this, because hard drives are just more fragile than SSDs. Now, Angelbird does include some value-added extras, including six months of parallels for Mac, three months of Bitwig Studio, some music software, and then some royalty-free music that you can tinker around with. But ultimately, deciding which of these products is best for you is probably going to come down to the convenience and the performance characteristics, and how all of that aligns with your personal preference. I do have to say though, I'm impressed with how far Angelbird has come in the last year. The Pocket delivers the same immaculate build quality as its predecessor, with incredible performance, and it looks like a winner in my book. Look how small it is. Anyway guys, thanks for watching. Like this video if you liked it, dislike it if you disliked it, leave a comment letting me know if you have, you know, requests for future videos or anything to say about this product. Would you buy an external SSD? Which of these four would you be interested in? Love to hear about you from you about that. Also check out the link in the video description. The support us link has links for where to buy cool t-shirts like this one. Give us a monthly contribution or change your Amazon bookmark to one with our affiliate code so we get a small kickback whenever you buy books or whatever it is people buy on Amazon these days. 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