Gadgetory

what's up gasps so back in May I asked Samsung for a review sample of their one terabyte t3 external SSD a few weeks later the drive showed up at my doorstep but was immediately placed on the back burner while my attention shifted to the RX 480 and gtx 1060 launches now even though i'm just getting around to posting my review of the t3 i've actually been using it daily since the date arrived needless to say my other drives have been extra jelly especially this one that fell into a jar of jelly like it's critically-acclaimed predecessor the t1 this revamped pocket SSD works with Windows Mac and Android devices and comes in variants of 250 gig 500 gig one terabyte and two terabyte capacities at 370 dollars USD the one terabyte model Curly goes 4.4 to $5 a gig right now the one terabyte 850 Evo goes for just 0.314 dollars a gig which is twice the rate most DJ's should be making per gig but if you're looking for a speedy external storage solution the t3 packs in some nice features that an internal SSD being used as an external device simply does not have for starters with a weight of 51 grams and dimensions of just 78 by fifty eight by ten and a half millimeters the t3 is super compact and makes other SSD enclosures seem bulky in comparison for being so small the drive feels surprisingly durable with its two-tone metal casing and internal frame that's shock resistant up to 1500 G's not those G's apart from a blue activity light the only thing you'll find around the enclosure is a type-c connector supporting USB 3.1 gen2 which is rated for 10 gigabits per second speeds USB 3.1 genuine is a slight iteration of USB 3.0 and retains its theoretical transfer rate of five gigabits per second what's that Jimmy that's a USB 3.1 Drive you've got right next you'll probably tell me that's a hoverboard you're on it would have been nice to have actual Gen 2 10 gigabits per second support here but I suppose I'll wait to run the benchmarks before making a big fuss the included type C to type a cable measures 18 inches or 45 centimeters long which leaves enough slack for plugging in behind your desktop but stays short enough to wrap quickly with the included velcro strap as many of you know one of the great triumphs of type C connectors is that they're reversible so there's never a need to double check the orientation of your cable or connector before plugging in finding the hole is the only goal to ensure that any sensitive files that you may have the driver mein private the t-3 can also be password protected using AES 256-bit encryption on the Box Samsung claims a sequential read and write transfer speed of 450 megabytes per second which puts it in the same league as modern SATA based SSDs I quickly verified these numbers using a toe disk mark and found a sequential read and write of 463 and 444 megabytes per second respectively showing speeds closer to or greater than the advertised specs like any good politician theoretical numbers only tell us half the story so to gauge real-world performance I first ran some transfer speed tests with the drive plugged into the USB 3.1 port of my Asus x99 sabertooth in hot line here it's important to note that the t3 also supports you ASP a USB protocol that boosts data throughput so I made sure to enable this option in AI suite 3 throughout our testing now to give us a frame of reference for how well the t3 performs we needed some competition so I rounded up two other common types of external drive solutions weighing in we have a fairly basic 32 gig Kingston DataTraveler USB 3.0 flash drive and a 512 gig a data SX 902 and a half inch SATA 3 SSD that I've mounted inside this hyper X external USB 3.0 enclosure a scandalous affair that would likely disappoint both their parents to see how these drive stack up let's have a look at our first write speed test which was a 10 gigabyte folder containing all the game files for Metro last light as we can see the t3 and SX 900 finish the transfer in the exact same time of 61 seconds while the thumb drive takes twice as long next I tried a larger game folder with hitman absolution and saw the a data SSD edged out the t3 by 13 seconds making it around 6 percent faster again our poor flash drive gets crushed by the SSDs taking 162 percent longer to write the files our next test involved writing a large batch of pictures taken with my samsung galaxy s6 most of them are shots of me eating watermelon while staring at a kilowatt again the USB 3 Drive falls way behind both SSDs and the SX 900 manages to shave 9 seconds off of the t3 time although just when it seems the t3 is always one step behind things get interesting once we try writing different types of incompressible data when moving a single 4 gig video file we see the table suddenly turn in Samsung's favor by nearly cutting the SX 900 s time in half and performing 3 times faster than the data traveler to vary by these results in a more extreme scenario I proceeded to write eighty eight gigs of incompressible video files to the two SSDs the results were consistent as we saw the t3 take 34% less time than the SX 900 which saved us about two and a half minutes precious time that was used to make love to my wife quality over quantity my friends from the numbers we're seeing it appears the pocket SSD shines brightest when handling incompressible data which just so happens to be what's often used in video editing so to put the drive through its paces I fired up Adobe Premiere Pro and tried working with some 4k footage straight off of the t3 surprisingly everything from previewing clips to scrubbing through the timeline proved to be very fluid regular playback and shuttling through the footage at full quality proven effortless tasks with no stuttering or dropped frames seeing this for myself I couldn't help but ask why couldn't all my trips to the bathroom go too smoothly at any rates the ability to use the drive as an editing disk via USB instantly gives the t3 more purpose than simply moving files from A to B making it an incredibly useful device when editing on the go now in most cases a terabyte of storage is plenty for video editing but it's also ample room for storing your games library of course you'll only make the most of this if the drive itself is fast enough to let you run those games off of it so for our final test I installed origin in Crysis 3 on the t3 to see what kind of gaming experience we could expect because frankly the client experience sucks no matter which drive it's on gaming on my x99 testbed with mac settings at quad HD load times were snappy and my entire playthrough was smooth to the point where the game might as well have been running off of my PC's internal SSD the drive did get moderately warm but you'll probably need a 950 pro if you want to fry some eggs running games via a USB connection could make a lot of sense for laptop users who don't have enough internal storage or if you just want to hijack every PC you come across to see if it can run Crysis after using the t3 for the past month or two I found that it has a lot to offer in nearly every aspect of an external drive speed portability build quality and security if I have to leave one category out here its affordability since the t3 does come at a notably higher dollar per gig than most SATA based SSDs with that premium however comes a truly compact design the type C convenience factor and rapid speeds that give way to versatility and time saving if your computer supports USB 3.1 and you're in the market for a new external drive don't let the price alone keep you from picking one of these up it's honestly the best external drive I've used since I can remember and I think it's worth every penny but let me know what you guys think of this thing in the comments and don't forget to toss me a like on this video