Samsung T9 review

The newest in a sequence of wonderful moveable SSDs that began round eight years in the past with the T1, Samsung’s T9 is the primary to deliver SuperSpeed USB 20Gbps efficiency to the desk.

In case you’re blessed with such a port (nee USB 3.2 2×2), it’s going to practically double the sustained throughput of the older T7. (Solely odd numbers are utilized in Samsung’s numbering for the sequence.)

Alas, in comparison with different 20Gbps drives, the T9 is merely a middle-of-the-pack performer. But it surely additionally supplies essentially the most luxe tactile expertise of the pack with its textured floor and sculpted traces.

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

Design & Options

The Samsung T9 is a 20Gbps USB SSD that makes use of NVMe internals, and sports activities a USB Kind C port for connectivity. Samsung supplies each Kind-A to Kind-C and Kind-C to Kind-C cables.

The SSD measures 3.46-inches lengthy by 2.36-inches extensive, and 0.55-inches thick. It weighs in at a mere 4.3 ounces. The internals are undoubtedly NVMe-based as SATA may by no means surpass 550MBps, not to mention obtain the practically 2GBps that the T9 is able to.

Samsung was mum concerning the controller and precise drive inside, but when I needed to guess, I’d go 970 Evo Plus or an replace on that given the value and efficiency, which you’ll examine under.

A cross-platform utility is offered by the corporate to show password safety on and off. The utility is required to entry the drive when password safety is enabled.

As for the T9’s textured, sculpted countenance (see the lead photograph), it makes the drive really feel very good and supplies a certain grip each within the hand and whereas rested on a clean floor. The down facet to the texturing, nevertheless, is that the drive collects mud, lint, and different schmutz at a close to report tempo. Tidying it up for the images was a little bit of a chore.

It’s drop examined to a few meters however carries no IP score for mud and waterproofing.

The T9 is warrantied for 5 years, although no TBW rankings (terabytes that could be written) had been offered. In our expertise, given affordable utilization, distributors will honor the guarantee time interval regardless.

Efficiency

The T9 is a efficiency leap past the 10Gbps Samsung T7 Contact and T7 Protect we’ve reviewed. But it surely’s not near the quickest 20Gbps SSD we’ve examined. That will be the mighty Essential X10 Professional.

As you’ll be able to see under, the 2TB T9 we examined turned in good, if not stellar CrystalDiskMark 8 scores. Sequential efficiency was a bit up and down, however fairly good total.

The T9 was once more a blended bag with CrystalDiskMark 8 4K efficiency. It was aces on the 32-queue learn, however the single-queue learn and 32-queue write had been noticeably missing in oomph.

The place the T9 dominated over the Kingston XS2000 and Teamgroup M200 was in our 48GB transfers. Shaving nearly 100 seconds off these drives’ occasions within the mixture.

The T9 took third place amongst 20Gbps drives within the 450GB write. Its time of 8 minutes and 23 seconds wasn’t nice, but it surely wasn’t as tragic because the Kingston XS2000’s efficiency. The T9 turned in a good sufficient rating reflecting an total write fee of round 900MBps.

Whereas not the quickest exterior USB SSD on the market, the T9 isn’t any slouch, and we actually like its 48GB switch occasions.

Samsung touts the T9’s low energy utilization and thermal output. Whereas the drive was heat after our testing, it was under no circumstances uncomfortable to the touch — one other plus for the silicon sleeve.

Worth

The T9 might be accessible in 1TB, 2TB, and 4TB capacities for $140/£176, $240/£269, and $440/£481, respectively, on the time of this writing. You should buy it from Amazon.

These are the MSRP’s offered by the corporate. You might even see totally different costs on-line. Notice that some unscrupulous on-line sellers will attempt to cost significantly extra when drives are model new and in demand.

Do you have to purchase the Samsung T9?

We respect Samsung’s historical past of delivering quick, dependable exterior USB SSDs. We’ve come to treat these drives as one thing of a normal. Nevertheless, on the time of this writing, Essential’s 4TB X10 Professional is barely $290, making the T9 appear overpriced.

This may occasionally change quickly. Regardless, in the event you go for the T9, it’s going to get the job accomplished, and in luxe vogue.

How we check

Drive checks presently make the most of Home windows 11 (22H2) 64-bit operating on an X790 (PCIe 5.0) motherboard/i5-12400 CPU combo with two Kingston Fury 32GB DDR5 modules (64GB of reminiscence complete). Intel built-in graphics are used. The 48GB switch checks make the most of an ImDisk RAM disk taking over 58GB of the 64GB complete reminiscence. The 450GB file is transferred from a Samsung 990 Professional 2TB, which additionally incorporates the working system. For exterior drives, the motherboard’s devoted Thunderbolt 4 and 20Gbps USB ports on the rear panel are used.

Every check is carried out on a newly formatted and TRIM’d drive so the outcomes are optimum. Notice that as any drive fills up, efficiency will lower resulting from much less NAND for secondary caching, and different components.

The efficiency numbers proven apply solely to the drive we had been shipped in addition to the capability examined. SSD efficiency can differ by capability resulting from extra or fewer chips to learn/write throughout and the quantity of NAND accessible for secondary caching (writing TLC/QLC as SLC). Distributors additionally sometimes swap parts.

In case you ever discover a big discrepancy between the efficiency you expertise and that which we report (techniques being roughly equal), by all means—tell us.