Samsung Portable SSD T5 Review: Speedy, Durable External Storage

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.