Samsung Portable SSD T5 Review: Speedy, Durable External Storage

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

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

pcm2

pcm1

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.

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