USB sticks are unlikely to be fast enough, however, for video editing and playback, especially 4K. The load and save times won’t be as fast as an SSD but will be faster than a portable hard drive. The fastest offer read/write speeds fast enough for files you need all the time, so you could use one as a photo archive, for example, or for work in progress. If all you need is supplementary storage or backup, a USB stick could do a good job.

They do not, however, offer the capacity of portable hard drives or portable SSDs, which typically start at 500GB and go up to 2TB or more.

You can get USB sticks right up to 256GB or larger capacities – a lot more than you might expect for such a small device – and if this is enough then already this is looking like a good solution. Yes and no – this depends entirely on what you need.

(Image credit: WD) Can you get USB sticks with enough capacity and speed? External SSDs are bigger and more awkward than USB sticks, but may be the only way to get the speed and capacity you need.

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