Samsung Portable SSD X5

amazon Samsung Portable SSD X5 reviews

The sleek, pricey Samsung Portable SSD X5 offers the fastest single-drive external storage money can afford, but it’s mostly suited to professionals who create more content using new-style Macs.

If you store all your data in the cloud, it can be confusing for an external hard drive to double duty as a status symbol. Even so, that’s what the sleek, incredibly fast, and expensive Samsung X5 portable SSD is ($699 for 1TB). Following in the footsteps of both Samsung’s flagship external drives like the T5 portable SSD and transitional hard drive artworks from LaCie and others, the X5 delivers massive amounts of solid-state storage at blazing speeds, thanks to the use of advanced Thunderbolt 3 and PCI Express NVMe interfaces. It would make a great gift for video editors tied to the Mac, those shooting in 4K, or photographers working in RAW, but it’s overkill for pretty much everyone else.

No speed limit

Suppose you’re someone who doesn’t like cloud storage like Google One or iCloud, constrained by the speed of internet access to your data. Using an SSD as your primary boot drive will make your computer work much faster than using a hard drive.

But things get more complicated when it comes to external drives that you plug into your laptop or desktop with a cable. The speed of drives depends on the cable and port connections and whether the drive is an SSD or a disk drive.

Simply put, you can buy an external RAID array filled with regular hard drives, such as the Akitio Thunder3 RAID that connects via a Thunderbolt 3 cable and delivers much faster speeds than an external SSD series like ADATA SE730. That drive uses a 5GBps USB 3.0 port, which is only one-eighth of the maximum potential bandwidth of a 40GBps Thunderbolt 3 connector. Still, internally, the SATA architecture it shares with most rack-mount external SSDs Other affordable has limited it to a theoretical maximum of around 500MBps.

If that sounds complicated, all you need to know is that the Samsung Portable SSD X5 doesn’t have these limitations. Not only does it use Thunderbolt 3, but it also uses the PCI Express (PCIe) NVMe interface, which means its data transfer rates are higher than usual compared to similar options. Our current episode for Samsung’s Portable, External SSD SSD T5.

Samsung claims that the 1TB version of the X5 portable SSD I tested can read data at a maximum speed of 2,800MB/s, and you can write data to it at 2,300MB/s. There is also a 2TB version with an identical maximum rated speed and a 500GB model with the same read speed but a rated write speed of 2,100MBps. In essence, the X5 promises to be faster than even the boot drive in your Mac or PC, unless it’s using a high-end PCIe NVMe boot drive like the Samsung SSD 970 EVO.

It’s very fast

The X5 Portable SSD delivers on its promise. The 2,326MBps write the score and 1,828MBps read the score on our Blackmagic throughput benchmark make it the fastest single-drive external drive we’ve ever tested. That is a significant achievement when comparing the portable SSD X5 with other small external SSDs that use SATA and a USB 3.0 or USB 3.1 connector. The T5 portable SSD scored 506MBps read, and 477MBps write on the Blackmagic test, while the cheaper ADATA SD700 scored 421MBps reads and 413MBps writes. The X5’s record is even more impressive when you consider that the next fastest drives in this test are huge, bulky desktop drives like the LaCie Bolt 3 and Akitio Thunder3 RAID, which have high read scores of around 2,000MBps at most.

You can transfer tons of video footage very quickly with this kind of throughput. For example, in its testing, Samsung moved a single 20GB file of 4K video footage from the X5 portable SSD to a PC in just over 10 seconds, more than four times faster than the T5 is capable. Moving the 20GB 4K video file back to the drive results in an even greater speed boost, according to Samsung: just over 11 seconds or five times faster than the T5’s speed in the same task.

Indeed, the Drag and Drop capabilities of the Portable SSD X5 were evident in this test release, which included moving a 1.3 GB folder full of mixed file types from the SSD boot drive on the SSD. We tested Apple MacBook Pro on an external drive. It completed this in just 1 second, slower than Samsung achieved with its single large 4K video file. But transferring many different file types with different sizes is taxing, and the X5 portable SSD is the fastest drive we’ve tested on this benchmark. Some large desktop external hard drives took almost 2 seconds, while the T5 portable SSD took 3 seconds.

That’s my official benchmark total. While trying to do my last external drive benchmark, the PCMark 7 Mass Storage Test, I ran into some issues. It’s an older program designed to emulate a wide variety of tasks, going beyond just transferring files back and forth to include things like using an external drive as the head disc for video editing. The test is not optimized for Thunderbolt 3 or PCIe NVMe, and it simply won’t run on the X5 portable SSD.

Big Note: It does not support USB

While speed is the X5’s calling card, its incompatibility with the PCMark 7 storage benchmark poses a bigger problem: Unlike every other external drive we’ve tested recently, The X5 Portable SSD is not officially compatible with any USB. You must use it with a PC or Mac equipped with Thunderbolt 3. I tried to connect it to a USB Type-C port on a Windows machine to no avail. The system knows that something is plugged in, but it won’t recognize it as a drive.

What’s more concerning: Thunderbolt 3 support on PC laptops and desktops was at its best in my anecdotal tests. You won’t find a Thunderbolt 3 port on most inexpensive laptops or desktops. Although the small, racetrack-shaped Thunderbolt 3 connector looks exactly like a USB Type-C connector, it’s more complicated than that. You must have a Thunderbolt 3 cable — Samsung provides one in the X5 portable SSD box — and a Thunderbolt 3 port on your computer, usually identified by the lightning icon next to it.

Even if your PC has Thunderbolt 3 support, attaching a Thunderbolt 3 accessory like the X5 portable SSD isn’t always plug and play. Intel’s Thunderbolt software must be in the background to recognize the drive, but it doesn’t, in my experience, always work. It didn’t run at all on a Dell Precision workstation or an Alienware laptop to which I tried to connect the X5 portable SSD. While it ran on the Asus ZenBook Pro, the X5 wasn’t recognized until I removed it from the Windows Control Panel list and reconnected.

The result is the X5 Portable SSD, which, like most Thunderbolt 3 peripherals, is most reliable when connected to a new Apple MacBook, MacBook Pro, or iMac. Our MacBook Pro tester had no trouble recognizing it and mounting it as an external drive on the desktop within seconds.

The X5 Portable SSD is not Thunderbolt’s proprietary PCIe NVMe 3 external SSD. For example, Dell’s competitive Thunderbolt 3 Portable SSD, available in 500GB or 1TB capacities, offers similar read speeds of 2,800MBps. We have not tested this or any other such drive.

Since you can connect the X5 portable SSD to your Mac, you’ll be pleased to know that it’s a drive that looks good, even better than other Samsung external drives. It’s bright red on the bottom and has a shiny, black metal finish on the top, so it won’t necessarily go well with your Space Gray MacBook, but it certainly won’t look bad next to it. It has a flair of its own.

The X5 portable SSD’s physical exterior is pretty solid. Samsung says it can withstand drops of up to 6.5 feet, thanks in part to its impact-resistant inner-frame. There’s also an internal heatsink to deal with the considerable heat that a PCIe NVMe SSD generates. Indeed, the drive did become warm – though not hot – to the touch when connected.

The only physical downside to the X5 Portable SSD is its weight. All that inner protection adds up to a drive that weighs 5.3 ounces. It feels heavy in hand and is particularly unwieldy compared to the feather-light SE730 (1.3 ounces), the T5 portable SSD (1.6 ounces), and even the Dell Thunderbolt 3 drive ( 2.2 ounces).

The drive’s bundled software is minimal. Don’t expect any free backup utilities, but again, using this lightning-fast drive as a backup disk would be a waste of its potential. You get a Windows and macOS app called Samsung Portable SSD that lets you update the drive’s firmware and choose a password to enable the built-in AES 256-bit hardware encryption. Password protection is a good idea, but beware that encrypting the drive can have a small negative impact on performance; I checked the drive without the password.

where can you get a Samsung Portable SSD X5 online

Samsung X5 Portable SSD – 1TB – Thunderbolt 3 External SSD (MU-PB1T0B/AM) Gray/Red: Buy it now

Samsung Portable SSD X5 500 GB Thunderbolt3 External SSD: Buy it now

Samsung Portable SSD X5 1 TB Thunderbolt3 External SSD: Buy it now

Hard Drive

Samsung offers a generous three-year warranty on the X5, although, like any warranty, it can’t help you if a failed drive damages your data. This warranty period matches the length Dell offers for its portable Thunderbolt 3 SSDs.

The X5 portable SSD’s super-fast speeds far outweigh the drive’s drawbacks, the most significant of which is the lack of USB support, which shouldn’t be a problem if you’re using it with a newer version, Thunderbolt 3- Mac is equipped. But that doesn’t take into account the drive’s Achilles heel: price.

At $699 for 1TB, the X5 Portable SSD costs 70 cents per gigabyte. The same outrageous cost per gigabyte applies to the $1,400 2TB model. The $400 500GB model is even worse, at 80 cents per gigabyte. That said, it matches the $799 1TB version of the Dell Thunderbolt 3 SSD. Compare these prices with the T5 Portable SSD, whose 1TB version currently costs $280, or 28 cents per gigabyte.

Advantages

Lightning-fast data transfer speeds thanks to Thunderbolt 3 and PCIe NVMe.

Multiple storage size options.

Attractive designs.

Disadvantage

Expensive.

Heavy.

USB is not supported.

Difficult to connect to Windows PC.