Samsung Portable SSD T1

Samsung Portable SSD T1

Some people call portable hard disk drives "pocket-sized" but stuffing these USB storage drives into your shirt pocket can be a huge challenge.

The slimmest hard drive may fit without ripping your pocket, but it is no more pocket-sized than a fat deck of playing cards.

Enter the new portable drive from Samsung, the SSD T1, which makes use of flash storage instead of the mechanical hard drive. With a footprint about three-quarters the size of a standard business card, and as thick as a stack of 10 cards, the T1 is the smallest portable storage drive I have ever seen.

It slips easily into any pocket, weighs about 30g (half the weight of a tennis ball) and is thin enough to remain unnoticed in the pocket.

Samsung claims that the T1 has the same performance as its internal SSD drives and is up to 100 times faster than its hard drive rivals.

From my own tests using the Crystal Mark benchmark, I managed to get 10 times the improvements with the T1 over a standard USB 3.0 portable hard drive for both random and sequential speed tests.

Random read and write speeds refer to copying a bunch of small files at the same time while sequential speeds are a measure of how fast it takes to copy a single large file.

Using flash also means there are no moving parts, so the drive can better withstand knocks and drops.

The T1 comes in three storage capacities - 250GB, 500GB and 1TB, which cost $269, $369 and $799 respectively.

While the benefits of using this SSD drive are abundant, this comes at a price. A standard 1TB USB3.0 portable hard drive costs about $100 so you are paying almost eight times for the SSD version.

- The T1 might make more sense for users who do not need so much storage space but for frenetic Bit Torrent fans, the cheaper hard drive does seem a lot more practical.

ginlee@sph.com.sg

TECH SPECS

Price: From $269 (250GB)

Interface: USB 2.0/3.0

Dimensions: 71mm x 9mm x 53mm

Warranty: Limited three-year warranty

Weight: 30g

RATING

Features: 4/5

Design: 5/5

Performance: 4/5

Value for money: 2/5

Overall: 4/5


This article was first published on Feb 11, 2015.
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