Review on Samsung Electronics T5 Portable 3.1 External SSD - MU-PA250B/AM by James Handy

A friend of mine recently bought a Seagate 2TB external hard drive for his Xbox One and told me how much faster it loads games now. He plays Battlefield and Destiny and says he loads the maps first almost every time. If you've played Destiny, then you know that load times suck when you go into orbit almost anywhere, and Battlefield maps can take a while at times, so using an external hard drive to cut that time is greatly appreciated. I bought this SSD with Destiny 2 in mind, confident that Bungie would still plague us with long load times. Thankfully they're not as bad as Destiny 1, but here's a rough breakdown of load times, which can understandably vary due to network issues (internet, Xbox Live, Bungie servers, or whatever), but these are the results when we Time measured in different situations (ALL when connected wirelessly to the internet): with Destiny 2 fully closed, from Xbox home screen to Destiny 2 main menu (exactly when "Press A to start” appears): - 12 seconds with Samsung T5 - 15 Seconds with a friend's 2TB Seagate hard drive - 17 seconds with the standard Xbox One. Overall, there's not a huge difference, but by the time you reach this screen, there's not much to download anyway. In Destiny 2, Orbit to Farm (excluding "3, 2, 1" start countdown): - 32 seconds with Samsung T5 - 44 seconds with a friend's 2TB Seagate hard drive - 46 seconds with Xbox One standard In Destiny 2, Booting from EDZ to Titan: - 30 seconds with a Samsung T5 - 49 seconds with a friend's Seagate 2TB HDD Our third Xbox bug detection tester wasn't around for this, but when I started the mission I was amazed at how long it took was waiting for my friend to boot after me - almost 20 seconds later! Well, these aren't scientific end results anyway. We only measured it once so it's not an average and that last test where my friend was almost 20 seconds behind me doesn't seem normal after we timed it and continued playing we never had a load time difference that seemed to be the same size again (rather total, network latency). Just last night about I loaded the map in front of me for the first time in a few days, so while it's safe to say the Samsung T5 will generally be a faster drive, network conditions can handle it, and everyone comes from time to time back to time. Overall I am very happy with this little device. 250GB is enough space to load your 3-4 essential screen loading games and if for some reason you want to play more than that many games at once, copy game files to/from this drive, which is also super fast. You will not be disappointed!