Samsung Portable SSD T5 Review: Speedy, Durable External Storage

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

Samsung Portable SSD T5 - PCMark Storage Benchmark

Page 6: Samsung Portable SSD T5 - PCMark Storage Benchmark

We like PCMark 7's Secondary Storage benchmark module for its pseudo real-world application measurement approach to testing. PCMark 7 offers a trace-based measurement under various scripted workloads of traditional client / desktop system use-cases. From simple application start-up performance, to data streaming from a drive in a game engine, and video editing with Windows Movie Maker, we are comfortable that these tests reasonably illustrate the performance profile of SSDs in an end-user / consumer PC usage model, more so than a purely synthetic transfer test.

Futuremark PCMark 7 Secondary Storage Test

Trace-based Storage Workloads

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The Samsung Portable SSD T5 posted a very strong PCMark score for an external drive, and trailed only the internal Samsung SSD 850 EVO SATA drive. If you dig into the individual test results in the top chart, you'll see that the T5 was competitive in almost every test and just barely missed the mark set by the 850 EVO.