​Flash technology has seen rapid advancements in the last few years including, with the mass production of planar 1x nm NAND, TLC, and 3D NAND. External high-speed interfaces such as USB 3.1 Gen 2 and Thunderbolt 3 have also become ubiquitous. The advent of Type-C has also enabled device vendors to agree upon a standardized connector for their equipment (be it mobile devices or desktop PCs). These advances have led to the appearance of small and affordable direct attached storage units with very high performance for day-to-day data transfer applications.

Introduction

Samsung has been an active participant in the high-performance external SSD market with their Portable SSD series. The T1 was introduced in early 2015, while the T3 came out in early 2016. The T3 was the first retail product to utilize Samsung's 48-layer TLC V-NAND. Today, Samsung is launching the Portable SSD T5. It is a retail pilot vehicle for their 64-layer TLC V-NAND as they ramp up its production. The Portable SSD T5 comes in four different capacity points - 250GB, 500GB, 1TB, and 2TB. It also moves up to a USB 3.1 Gen 2 Type-C interface, while retaining the same compact form factor and hardware encryption capabilities of the Portable SSD T3.

​The important features of the Portable SSD T5 series are summarized below:

  • Retention of the same maximum capacity point as the T3 (2TB) while moving to denser 64-layer V-NAND.
  • Availability in multiple colors (Deep Black for the 1TB and 2TB variants, Alluring Blue for the 250GB and 500GB ones)
  • Migration to a USB 3.1 Gen 2 Type-C interface (compared to the USB 3.1 Gen 1 Type-C interface in the T3), resulting in upgraded performance numbers (up to 540 MBps)
  • Official compatibility with Android devices - even for hardware-encrypted volumes (similar to T3)
  • Retention of the partial metal enclosure to improve heat dissipation (similar to T3)
  • Migration to a newer USB 3.1 Gen 2 - SATA III bridge chip (ASMedia ASM235CM in the T5, compared to the ASM1153 in the T3)
  • Support for TRIM (unavailable in the previous Samsung Portable SSDs)

The Portable SSD T5 series is available for purchase today, starting at $130 for the 250GB model. Samsung sampled us the 500GB and 2TB variants for evaluation.

The T5's form factor is very similar to that of the T3. It is not a thumb drive, but it is definitely compact (dimensions of 74 x 57.3 x 10.5mm) and lightweight (51g). Samsung claims that it is shock-resistant, and can withstand a 2m fall. The USB-C port is the only visible opening in the T5's case. There are four screws well-hidden by seamless stickers. The package also comes with two 0.5m cables - 1x USB Type-C male to Type-A male, and 1x USB Type-C male to Type-C male. Both are obviously rated for USB 3.1 Gen 2 operation.

Prior to looking at the internals, CrystalDiskInfo provides us some insight. We only look at the 2TB variant here (the 500GB version is quite similar).

Despite the indication of S.M.A.R.T support, the relevant data was not visible to most of the commonly used tools. On the USB side, the drive supports UASP (USB-attached SCSI Protocol) that should provide increased performance for sequential transfers. Claimed transfer rates are 540 MBps for sequential accesses, which essentially means that the SATA interface of the internal SSD can be saturated. We also have hardware-accelerated AES-256 encryption. In the rest of this section, we will take a look at the internal hardware followed by some usage impressions.

Internal Hardware

Compared to the T1 and T3, the T5 proved to be very easy to disassemble, needing only two out of the four screws to be removed. The internal PCB could then be easily slid out. Various pictures from our disassembly process (including shots of the heavy thermal protection) are available in the galleries below.

The teardown of the 2TB version shows the ASMedia ASM235CM bridge chip on the board with the Type-C connector. Attached to the board is a mSATA device with four flash packages, a SSD controller, and a single DRAM package. The four flash packages all carry the K9DUGB8H1A tag, while the controller is the standard MGX one used in the 850 EVO series (S4LN062X01). The DRAM part number is K4E8E164EB-SGCF 8Gbit package, pointing to 1GB of LPDDR3 (the same as the Portable SSD T3 2TB version). The mSATA segment of the Portable SSD T5 2TB is essentially the same as that of the Portable SSD T3 2TB, except for the four flash packages.

The 500GB teardown was similar to the 2TB version. The only difference was in the mSATA card. Instead of four, we have only two flash packages. The part number is also different (K9OMGY8H5A) since we only need 250GB per package, and that can be achieved with just half the number of dies that need to be in the package of the 2TB version. The DRAM part number (K4E4E16-4EESGCE) indicates 512MB of LPDDR3. Overall, it is again similar to the 500GB 850 EVO, except for the flash packages.

The other side of the mSATA PCB, despite having no flash packages, is protected by a thermal pad between the board and the internal plastic frame.

Usage Impressions

The Portable SSD T5 comes with security disabled by default. The default exFAT partition is mounted automatically upon connecting to a PC. If the Samsung Portable SSD software in the partition is installed, a password can be set up to enable security / encryption. If a password has been set before, a 83MB FAT32 partition is mounted first. This read-only partition has a copy of the Portable SSD software which can be used to enter the password and unlock the drive. Therefore, deleting the Portable SSD installer in the main partition is perfectly fine even if encryption has been enabled.

Coming back to the usage aspects, the exFAT volume is available without installing any special programs on both Windows and Mac OS systems. Linux users might need to install an external package to get exFAT support. Though Samsung claims Android support for the unit, it is only for the encryption aspect. The Portable SSD app allows users to enable / disable / unlock the encryption (security) on a drive.

We attached the T5 to a Huawei Nexus 6P using the Type-C to Type-C cable that came along with the phone. There was no trouble accessing the drive on the phone. The only caveat is that Android doesn't support exFAT. Samsung's updated Portable SSD app still doesn't enable exFAT support. In any case, the Nexus 6P force-formatted the T5 in FAT32, but, after that, there was no issue in transferring data between the phone and a PC using the T5. Android compatibility is nice to have, but we would definitely like Samsung to provide exFAT support through the Portable SSD app.

Synthetic Benchmarks
Comments Locked

38 Comments

View All Comments

  • timecop1818 - Tuesday, August 15, 2017 - link

    what workload on a Macintosh would require so much data transfer anyway? you don't need 3000mb/sec to stare at a desktop or play candy crush
  • jdshewman - Wednesday, August 16, 2017 - link

    Photographers, HD and 4K video. With the abundance of travel bloggers and drones, extra storage with speed is valuable.
  • AnTech - Thursday, August 17, 2017 - link

    Which one? Any of these or is there anyone else coming?

    Sonnet Fusion Thunderbolt 3 PCIe Flash Drive
    http://www.sonnettech.com/product/fusiontb3pciefla...

    JMR Lightning LTNG-XTD portable Thunderbolt SSD
    http://jmr.com/product/jmr-lightningltng-xtd-porta...
  • name99 - Wednesday, August 16, 2017 - link

    Of course it is. Macs have handled booting from external drives since forever (at least the initial FireWire days). I run my iMac 2012 off an external USB3 SSD because the internal HD failed. Hell, you can even create a fusion boot drive between an external SSD and an internal hard drive if you like, and that's how I run my 2007 iMac (SSD connected via FW800).

    Being able to boot painlessly from external drives is one of the great Mac advantages that Win and Linux folks don't seem to know about because it's not part of their world. I do it all the time, sometimes for machines whose internal drives die, sometimes to give a speed boost to an old machine (like the 2007 iMac setup I described above), sometimes as a diagnostic when a machine seems to be behaving badly. (Good way to learn/test that an internal HD is going bad...)

    Obviously you will want to format the external drive to JHFS+ (or wait two months and format it to APFS...), you can't boot off exFAT or NTFS or whatever it comes formatted with.
  • VulkanMan - Tuesday, August 15, 2017 - link

    How long can these retain the data without being powered?

    Is that information included anywhere?
  • coder543 - Tuesday, August 15, 2017 - link

    No one lists that information for any SSD that I've seen, but the minimum JEDEC spec for a consumer SSD is one year without power. Realistically, I have trouble imagining less than 5 years being a problem, but it would be interesting to have numbers.
  • VulkanMan - Tuesday, August 15, 2017 - link

    Most SSDs have been internal and those usually get powered up daily / weekly.
    Since these are external, not everyone is going to know that they must power the devices up at least once every X months, so they shouldn't be used for long term storage.

    I would think they would put warnings on these that data loss is possible if you don't power them up semi-frequently.
  • Billy Tallis - Tuesday, August 15, 2017 - link

    Powering up the drive periodically or even continuously doesn't solve anything. All of the data has to be moved or re-written in order to prolong retention times. But since those retention times are measured in years not months, it's not worth warning about.
  • Billy Tallis - Tuesday, August 15, 2017 - link

    JEDEC spec is for one year of unpowered data retention after the drive's rated write endurance has been exhausted. A drive that hasn't been absolutely hammered with writes will retain data far longer.
  • Bullwinkle J Moose - Tuesday, August 15, 2017 - link

    I'll stick with an 850 Pro because it works on any USB 3 and 3.1 port with an adapter

    The 850 Pro is faster than this drive as well

    I avoid "USB Only" external drives because you can only install Windows 2 Go Spyware Platforms on them

    With the 850 Pro, I can also install Windows XP and use it with SATA and ESATA ports as well as any USB port

    With this one, you are stuck with USB only

    So sad!

Log in

Don't have an account? Sign up now