This article is part of a DEVELOP3D workstation special report. But if you need to move files quickly or open data directly from a portable drive, this is a small price to pay. The 500GB model costs £189, the 1TB model £380 and the 2TB model £759 (all Ex VAT).
It also boasts AES 256-bit hardware encryption so you can keep your data secure.īut it’s not cheap. It’s well-built and is signficantly faster, particularly when reading/writing large files. The Samsung Portable SSD X5 is a worthy successor to the T5. It averaged 355GB/sec read and 419GB/sec write (compared to 246GB/sec read and 217GB/sec write on the T5).įinally, with 8.2GB of SolidWorks data, comprising 14,000 relatively small CAD parts and assemblies, speeds averaged 142MB/sec read and 148MB/sec write (compared to the 105MB/sec read and 90MB/sec write on the T5.) Our 3ds Max dataset offers more of a mix, comprising 60 large scene files and 4,400 smaller materials, totalling 4.6GB. This is about three times faster than the T5 (396MB/sec read and 335MB/sec write). The biggest gains came with the biggest files.įor example, with 68 large Revit files, totalling 4.6GB, read performance averaged 1,153MB/sec and write performance 1,147MB/sec. In tests, we found it to be significantly faster than the Samsung SSD T5. The drive came formatted to exFAT so it can work on multiple operating systems, but we reformatted to NTFS as this should give more performance, particularly with small files. The Samsung Portable SSD X5 Review x5 ssd Samsung X5 Thunderbolt 3 Portable SSD x5 ssd Thunderbolt 3 speeds x5 ssd Samsung X5 500GB Up to 2, 800MB/s x5 ssd. We used a Dell Precision 5530 2-in-1 to test read/write speeds over Thunderbolt 3 with three real-world datasets from Revit, SolidWorks and 3ds Max. It comes with a 45cm Thunderbolt 3 (USB-Type C) cable.
It weighs 150g and is 119 x 62 x 19.7mm in size. The Samsung Portable SSD X5 is a little bit bigger than its USB 3.1 predecessor, the Samsung SSD T5, but it’s still nice and compact.
It’s shock resistant, with Samsung claiming it can withstand accidental drops of up to two metres.