Samsung Portable SSD T5 Review: Speedy, Durable External Storage

by Marco Chiappetta — Tuesday, August 15, 2017, 10:00 AM EDT

Our Test Methodologies: Under each test condition, the Solid State Drives tested here were installed as secondary volumes in our testbed, with a separate drive used for the OS and benchmark installations. Out testbed's motherboard was updated with the latest BIOS available at the time of publication and AHCI (or RAID) mode was enabled.

The SSDs were secure erased prior to testing, and left blank without partitions for some tests, while others required them to be partitioned and formatted, as is the case with our ATTO, PCMark, SANDRA, and CrystalDiskMark benchmark tests. Windows firewall, automatic updates, and screen savers were all disabled before testing, and Quiet Hours were enabled. In all test runs, we rebooted the system, ensured all temp and prefetch data was purged, waited several minutes for drive activity to settle and for the system to reach an idle state before invoking a test.

Test System Configuration

Intel Inside

SiSoft SANDRA

Synthetic HDD Benchmarking

First up, we have some numbers with SiSoft SANDRA, the the System ANalyzer, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant. Here, we used the Physical Disk test suite and provide the results from our comparison SSDs. The benchmarks were run on unformatted drives and read and write performance metrics are detailed below.

To give you some reference points, we've compared the Samsung Portable SSD T5's performance to an array of mainstream internal SATA-based solid state drives, to the previous-gen T3, and to a USB 3.0 Corsair Voyager GT thumb drive.

As you can see, the Samsung Portable SSD T5 rocked the SiSoft SANDRA Physical Disk Benchmark. The drive significantly outpaces the USB 3.0 thumb drive and the T3, and keeps pace with the internal SATA SSDs.

Tags: Samsung, SSD, Storage, portable, usb-c, usb 3.1, samsung t5

Marco Chiappetta

Marco's interest in computing and technology dates all the way back to his early childhood. Even before being exposed to the Commodore P.E.T. and later the Commodore 64 in the early ‘80s, he was interested in electricity and electronics, and he still has the modded AFX cars and shop-worn soldering irons to prove it. Once he got his hands on his own Commodore 64, however, computing became Marco's passion. Throughout his academic and professional lives, Marco has worked with virtually every major platform from the TRS-80 and Amiga, to today's high end, multi-core servers. Over the years, he has worked in many fields related to technology and computing, including system design, assembly and sales, professional quality assurance testing, and technical writing. In addition to being the Managing Editor here at HotHardware for close to 15 years, Marco is also a freelance writer whose work has been published in a number of PC and technology related print publications and he is a regular fixture on HotHardware’s own Two and a Half Geeks webcast. - Contact: marco(at)hothardware(dot)com