Portable SSDs? (and General External Drives Q)

[StanleyParable]

Just in the market for an external drive after a drive failure (actually, make that an external and internal drive. You always figure out backups are important too late) and I'm just idly wondering: Are portable SSDs a thing yet or actually desirable?

It seems to me that external storage has kind of reach the limit for now - (do we actually need more than 4TB?). I know SSDs are pointless for general storage, but I'm still surprised that I've yet to see an external SSD.

So, say if I have two computers (desktop and laptop) and I play games and use the same applications on both. If I had an external SSD I could enjoy SSD speeds on both, right? (perhaps they'd have to be E-SATA?) That'd technically bring down the price per gigabyte?

Just wondering if anyone on a hardware-site had seen something like that.

Actually, since I'm in the market for a backup drive (and not that knowledgeable about tech), I was wondering if speed-wise, it's worth being all that bothered about read/write speeds with "normal" hard-disk drives anymore? Especially if I'm just using it for backing stuff up? (thinking of picking up one of these from a local Maplin on the way home).

[shaithis]

You can drop an SSD in any SATA-based external enclosure....I would use eSATA or USB3 to connect it though or it would be a waste of money.

You could pop your steam folder on it and have it switch-able between 2 PCs....but for it to work inter-changeably you would have to look at each application and it's requirements.

[kalniel]

External drives are just normal drives inside enclosures, so you can buy the enclosure and then fit any drive of the right size in you like.

SSD have the advantage of robustness - they're much better than mechanical drives in that respect. But the speed advantage might be mitigated by the interface - even USB3 or eSata will be limiting the speed advantage of SSDs over mechanical drives. Other controller technologies are in development for this reason.