You won't have any trouble fitting it in your pocket. It's a tiny bit smaller than most credit and business cards, but a little bit thicker than the average smartphone. Samsung T5 design and box contentsĪt 51g and 74x57.3x10.5mm (3.0x2.3x0.4 inches), the Samsung T5 is practically identical to its predecessor - the T3 - in terms of size and weight. Does the Samsung T5 live up to that claim? Let's find out in our review.
While we might not come anywhere near those theoretical speeds just yet, today we have a drive that aims to offer the fastest portable SSD experience till date. 2, which theoretically offers speeds of up to 10Gbps - that's beginning to change. With the introduction of USB 3.1 - specifically USB 3.1 Gen. You could justify this a bit because of the higher speed that you get, but that has traditionally been a problem as well. While low-capacity SSDs have become accessible, the capacities of external drives on average tend to be a lot higher, which means you are looking at pretty high costs of entry. While prices of internal SSDs have come down to a point where many can afford to buy a machine where at least part of the storage is solid-state, most external storage solutions still tend to involve hard disks. If you are someone who's made the switch from a hard disk to a SSD as your primary storage medium, the difference in performance can be like night and day.
GPUs continue to evolve at a fast pace, but the improvements in the performance of most other PC components has been incremental at best - that's if you don't count SSDs. The Samsung Portable SSD T5 is a step forward in today’s storage realm.If you use a computer, perhaps the most significant development in the past few years has been the rise of solid-state drives aka SSDs.
Pricing is right there for the T5, a three year warranty, security software that is a snap to set up, performance that simply cannot be beat in a medium of this size, and a device so compact that it fits in the palm of your hand and can be thrown in your pocket. Simply put, the Samsung Portable SSD T5 sets an industry standard for others to follow. Similarly, Samsung could never create such a similar RAID version of the T5 without a size increase and definite heat concerns… or could they? Don’t get me wrong the Glyph is a ballistic plate compared to the T5 weighing in at over a pound and you won’t be simply tossing that in your pocket anytime soon. Without taking anything whatsoever away from the T5, I am left wanting and it is the fault of the Glyph Atom RAID external SSD that pushes disk transfer speeds above 850MB/s. Samsung will weigh the demand of such, as they have always done before bringing a product to market.
Tucked away beneath the hard aluminum unibody case lies Samsung’ latest 64-Layer V-NAND memory and perhaps sooner than later, we will see capacities increase in the next version, without increasing the footprint of the drive. These tests most definitely validate Samsung’s claims that their newest T5 is a step up from, not only their T3 but also, other similar industry portable SSDs.Ĭapable of disk transfer speeds faster than the listed 540MB/s with capacities up to 2TB and weighing only 51 grams, the Samsung Portable SSD T5 is without a doubt the most compact and speedy storage medium available today. Next fastest is the T5 with the Type-C cable followed by the Type-A cable, T3 and then the ADATA SE730. The Glyph Atom RAID external SSD is still top of its class for speed, hitting top speeds of over 800MB/s and I am not sure anything else in the industry touches it. Let’s get the elephant in the room cleared away first.
For our tests, we compare video, music, picture and OS files in batches of 15GB and move them from one spot to another on the drive itself. We elected to test the Samsung Portable SSD T5 against the Glyph AtomRAID, ADATA SE730, as well as testing the T5 with both the Type C and type A cables.