Hi everyone.
This sounds like a silly question… but if I bought a) an external USB3 Solid State Disk, such as one of these and b) a USB3 memory stick such as this, what are the technological differences between them? They’re both “solid state” and both connect over USB - are external SSDs basically big thumb drives, or is there some other fundamental difference in the technology?
Thanks in advance 
What it really comes down to:
The big difference in an SSD is that it is designed for a significant number of write cycles. Flash memory wears out, and has a limited number of times it can be written to before it starts to die. Making the flash memory live longer - ie accept more writes - is in competition with memory density, speed, and cost. SSD systems use a reasonably sophisticated controller that tries to even out the writes over the flash memory (wear levelling) and they tend to use flash memory chips that are rated for more write cycles from the outset. They also are provisioned with an excess of flash memory over the amount made available for use - giving them the ability to swap in a fresh page of memory when another is starting to wear out. A USB thumb drive will tend to use the cheapest controller and flash memory, and will have dramatically fewer write cycles available to it than an SSD. (Even SSDs are not all born equal - those intended for enterprise use are significantly more expensive again than ordinary SSDs, and have orders of magnitude more write cycles available.)
If you tried to use a USB thumb drive as a conventional disk in a computer, you would see it die in a depressingly short amount of time. I have seen this happen.
Also SSDs have the flash chips distributed across 4-8 “channels” of the controller, so writes and reads from the flash memory is a hell of a lot faster.
Both are based on the same technology.
The SSD just uses better components, like chips & controller.
If you want a comparison, think of this boat as the USB Memory Stick and this boat as the SSD - both boats do float
Thanks everyone 
