Samsung T5 Evo review

The Samsung T5 Evo is a ruggedized, handsome moveable SSD, however what units it other than the group is that it’s out there with as much as 8TB of capability. That, of us, is quite a lot of house.

The T5 Evo is gradual for a contemporary exterior SSD, although it beats a 2.5-inch arduous drive for efficiency and the power to face up to abuse by a rustic mile. Should you’re in search of scintillating pace, look elsewhere. Should you’re about capability, look right here.

Additional studying: See our roundup of the perfect moveable arduous drives and SSDs to find out about competing merchandise.

Design & Options

The T5 Evo is a USB 3.2 Gen 1 (5Gbps) exterior SSD that measures roughly 3.75-inches lengthy, by 0.6-inches thick, by 1.57-inches huge. That size features a 0.4-inch steel loop at one finish that you need to use for attaching a lanyard or the like.

The drive weighs round 113g and feels strong within the hand. It’s additionally lined with a sure-grip, silicon-like jacket and is shock-rated as much as 1500Gs must you lose your grip anyway.

Alas, the jacket additionally has a propensity for attracting schmutz, aka small particulate matter (see beneath). This image was snapped after utilizing a microfiber towel and canned air.

For aesthetic causes and to not belabor the purpose, I cleaned up this subsequent picture of the T5 Evo’s non-business finish.

Samsung was mum about the kind of controller and bridge chip used within the T5 Evo (as per regular) — nonetheless, as you may suspect with a most capability of 8TB, the NAND is 176-layer QLC.

QLC stands for Quad Degree Cell and might maintain 4 bits of information per cell. The explanation QLC tends to be gradual writing is that it takes a big quantity of error checking to make it possible for the correct voltage stage (one among 16!) has certainly been written.

Samsung additionally gives its Moveable SSD software program (first picture beneath) so you’ll be able to flip the T5 Evo’s native AES-256 encryption on and off and password defend it.

The extra succesful Samsung Magician software program (second picture beneath) additionally shows numerous info resembling the quantity of information that’s been written to the drive.

Word that the quantity of information written proven beneath could appear excessive for a brand new drive, however we usually fill the drive no less than as soon as in our testing (the next picture was taken earlier than testing was full). Regular utilization will garner a far decrease quantity.

Samsung warranties the T5 Evo for 3 years, which is a bit parsimonious in comparison with the 5 years Essential and others provide on their exterior drives. It’s additionally deemed restricted, which is par for the course, however the firm didn’t present any TBW ranking (terabytes that my be written over the lifetime of the drive) pertaining to the bounds.

The corporate does state that bodily injury is just not lined. I don’t blame them. You’d need to run over this factor with a tank or incinerate it to kill it.

Efficiency

The T5 Evo is 5Gbps (Gen 1) USB 3.2 that means that it doesn’t matter what’s inside, it’s mainly capped at 550MBps. The one different similar-performing drive to grace our newest check mattress is Teamgroup’s C212 thumb-sized SSD.

The C212 is definitely a 10Gbps drive that solely reached Gen 2-appropriate speeds with smaller information units, not the 64GB we use with CrystalDiskMark 8.

Sequential throughput in CrystalDiskMark 8 was roughly on par for a 5Gbps USB SSD. However random write efficiency was a bit off. This may be no less than partially as a result of density and quantity of NAND.

Principally, the T5 Evo is about capability moderately than stellar efficiency, as you’ll be able to see within the charts. The 10Gbps Samsung T7 Defend, and 20Gbps T9 are far, far sooner. As is the present cream of the efficiency crop: Essential’s X10 Professional.

After all the T5 Evo was off the overall tempo with our 48GB file transfers, however any 5Gbps SSD would carry out at roughly the identical pace. We merely don’t see a lot of these anymore, therefore their absence from the efficiency graphs.

Being an 8TB drive actually helped the T5 Evo because it wrote our single 450GB check file. It maintained its roughly 400MBps tempo till we threw one other 1.5TB at it. At that time, writing dropped to round 195MBps and stayed there.

Outdoors of an preliminary copy, few folks will write 1.5TB of information at anyone time, so take that with a grain of salt. With time to recuperate secondary cache, you need to not often see the efficiency drop.

Worth & Availability

Pre-launch, Samsung quoted us an MSRP of $190/£159.99 for the 2TB model, $350/£294.99 for the 4TB, and $650/£538.99 for the 8TB T5 Evo.

By comparability, the far sooner Samsung T9 (which isn’t out there in an 8TB SKU) is simply $10 extra within the 2TB model (or the identical worth within the UK) and, on the time of this overview, really $100 much less/£15 cheaper at 4TB from Samsung’s personal Amazon retailer. We additionally noticed no-name 8TB SSDs for round $550.

Clearly, one thing must give price-wise if the T5 Evo is to promote on something apart from model loyalty, so maintain an eye fixed out. We anticipate the costs to drop moderately quickly.

The T5 Evo is because of go on sale in December.

Do you have to purchase the Samsung T5 Evo?

If reasonably priced capability from a top-name vendor is what you search, then you need to goal the T5 Evo. It’s no barn-burner, nevertheless it’s actually quick sufficient for many duties, and there’s no arguing the quantity of digital stuff it might match. The case turns into much more compelling if Samsung drops the costs to aggressive ranges, as I anticipate will occur.

This overview initially appeared on PCWorld.

How we check

Exterior drive assessments at the moment make the most of Home windows 11, 64-bit operating on an X790 (PCIe 4.0/5.0) motherboard/i5-12400 CPU combo with two Kingston Fury 32GB DDR5 4800MHz modules (64GB of reminiscence whole). Each 20Gbps USB and Thunderbolt 4 are built-in to the again panel and Intel CPU/GPU graphics are used. The 48GB switch assessments make the most of an ImDisk RAM disk taking on 58GB of the 64GB of whole reminiscence. The 450GB file is transferred from a 2TB Samsung 990 Professional which additionally runs the OS.

Every check is carried out on a newly formatted and TRIM’d drive so the outcomes are optimum. Word that in regular use, as a drive fills up, efficiency could lower resulting from much less NAND for secondary caching, in addition to different elements. This may be much less of an element with the present crop of SSDs with far sooner late era NAND.

Caveat: The efficiency numbers proven apply solely to the drive we have been shipped and to the capability examined. SSD efficiency can and can differ by capability resulting from extra or fewer chips to shotgun reads/writes throughout and the quantity of NAND out there for secondary caching. Distributors additionally sometimes swap parts. Should you ever discover a big discrepancy between the efficiency you expertise and that which we report, by all means, tell us.