Samsung Portable SSD X5 Review

If you store all your data in the cloud, it might be hard to fathom an external hard drive doing double duty as a status symbol. That's exactly what the sleek, wildly fast, and eye-wateringly expensive Samsung Portable SSD X5 ($699 for 1TB) is, though. Following in the footsteps of both Samsung's 

own flagship external drives like the Portable SSD T5 and design-forward works of hard drive art from LaCie and others, the X5 offers copious amounts of solid-state storage at extreme speeds, thanks to its use of the cutting-edge Thunderbolt 3 and PCI Express NVMe interfaces. It would make a killer gift for 

Mac-bound video editors who shoot in 4K or photographers who work in RAW, but it's overkill for pretty much anyone else.If you're a denizen of cloud storage like Google One or iCloud, bound by network-access speeds to your data, your eyes might glaze over when your tech-savvy friends insist on 

the superiority of the solid-state drive (SSD) over the regular old spinning hard drive. How right they are, though. If you use an SSD as your main boot drive, it will make your computer feel much faster than if it uses 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 those drives depends as much on the speed of the cable and the port to which it's connected as it does on whether or not the drive is an SSD or a platter-based hard drive.

To wit, you could buy an external RAID array full of regular hard drives, such as the Akitio Thunder3 RAID that connects via a Thunderbolt 3 cable and delivers much faster speeds than a run-of-the-mill external SSD like the ADATA SE730($57.99 at Amazon). Not only does that drive use a 5GBps USB 3.0 port, which has just an eighth of the potential maximum bandwidth of the 40GBps Thunderbolt 3 connector, but internally, the SATA architecture that it shares with most other affordable external SSDs limits it to a theoretical maximum of around 500MBps.

If that all sounds complicated, all you need to know is that the Samsung Portable SSD X5 has none of these limitations. Not only does it use Thunderbolt 3, but it also makes use of the PCI Express (PCIe) NVMe interface, which means that its data transfer rates are stratospheric compared with even the likes

 of our current Editors' Choice for external SSDs, Samsung's own Portable SSD T5.Samsung claims that the 1TB version of the Portable SSD X5 that I tested can read data at a maximum of 2,800MBps, and you can write data to it at 2,300MBps. There's also a 2TB version with identical maximum rated 

speeds, 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 is using a high-end PCIe NVMe boot drive like the Samsung SSD 970 EVO.And the Portable SSD X5 delivers

 on its promise. Its 2,326MBps write score and 1,828MBps read score on our Blackmagic throughput benchmark make it the fastest single-drive external drive we've ever tested. This a significant achievement when you compare the Portable SSD X5 to other small external SSDs that use SATA and 

the USB 3.0 or USB 3.1 connectors. The Portable SSD T5 achieved 506MBps read speeds and 477MBps write speeds on the Blackmagic test, while the cheaper ADATA SD700 recorded 421MBps reads and 413MBps writes. The X5's achievement is even more impressive when you consider that the next-fastest drives on this test are huge, bulky desktop drives like the LaCie Bolt 3( at Amazon) and the Akitio Thunder3 RAID, whose read scores top out at around 2,000MBps.

You could transfer a ton of video footage very quickly with this sort of throughput. For example, in its own testing, Samsung was able to move a single 20GB file of 4K video footage from the Portable SSD X5 to a PC in just over 10 seconds, which is four times faster than the T5 is capable of. Moving a 20GB 

4K video file back to the drive results in even greater speed gains, according to Samsung: just over 11 seconds, or five times faster than the T5's speed on the same task.

Indeed, the Portable SSD X5's proficiency at dragging and dropping was apparent on PC Labs' own version of this test, which involves moving a 1.3GB folder full of mixed file types from the SSD boot drive on our Apple MacBook Pro testbed to the external drive. It accomplished this in just 1 second,

 which corresponds to a slower rate than Samsung achieved with its single large 4K video file. But transferring many different file types of different sizes is more taxing, and the Portable SSD X5 was again the fastest drive we've tested on this benchmark. A few large external desktop drives come close, at 2 seconds, while the Portable SSD T5 took 3 seconds