The external storage market has experienced rapid growth over the last few years, particularly in the retail consumer segment. The demand has been fueled by increased amounts of user-generated multimedia content and high-resolution artwork / assets for games that are better off being installed in external drives. The growth has mainly been in in bus-powered flash-based storage devices.

Thunderbolt SSDs are at the top in terms of both performance and price, but the last few years have seen various high-end portable SSDs with a USB interface.
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