Samsung Portable SSD T3 Review: Fast, Sleek USB-C Storage

Name: Samsung T3 SSD
Brand: Samsung

by Marco Chiappetta — Monday, February 22, 2016, 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 as of press time 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 7, and CrystalDiskMark benchmark tests. Windows firewall, automatic updates and screen savers were all disabled before testing. In all test runs, we rebooted the system, ensured all temp and prefetch data was purged, and waited several minutes for drive activity to settle and for the system to reach an idle state before invoking a test.

HotHardware Test System

Intel Core i7 and SSD Powered

Processor -

Motherboard -

Video Card -

Memory -

Audio -

Storage -

Hardware Used:
Intel Core i7-6700K

Asus Z170 Deluxe
(Z170 Chipset, AHCI Enabled)

Intel HD

16GB Corsair DDR4

Integrated on board

Corsair Force GT (OS Drive)
Micron M550 (256GB)
Samsung SSD 850 EVO (500GB)
Corsair Flash Voyager GT USB 3.0 (64GB)
Intel SSD 730 (480GB)
OCZ Trion 150 (960GB)
Samsung Portable SSD T3 (1TB)

OS -
Chipset Drivers -
DirectX -

Video Drivers -

Relevant Software:
Windows 10 Pro x64
Intel 10.0.26, iRST 13.6.0.1002
DirectX 11

Intel HD 10.18.10.33

Benchmarks Used:
HD Tune v5.50
ATTO v2.47
AS SSD
CrystalDiskMark v3.0.3 x64
PCMark 7
SiSoftware Sandra 2014

SiSoft SANDRA 2014

Synthetic HDD Benchmarking

First up, we have some numbers with SiSoft SANDRA 2014, 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 T3's performance to an array of mainstream internal SATA-based solid state drives and to an USB 3.0 Corsair Voyager GT thumb drive.

Here, in the SiSoft SANDRA Physical Disk Benchmark, the T3 significantly outpaces the USB 3.0 thumb drive, but can't quite catch any of the SATA-based offerings. The T3 broke the 400MB/s mark in reads, however, which is much faster than any external hard drive could muster.

Tags: Samsung, SSD, Storage, USB, T3

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