Review on Samsung Electronics T5 Portable 3.1 External SSD - MU-PA250B/AM by Yuri Rochelin

Samsung's new portable SSD uses some new technology, but performance is similar to its previous (and excellent) T3 drive. The T5 is one of the first consumer products to feature the new 3D NAND technology, in which the chip is laid out vertically to allow greater storage density in small form factors. It also has a faster USB interface than the previous version. What does this mean for the average user? A little. The reality of this drive is that it's close to last year's drive. That's not bad considering how well the T3 performs as a portable SSD. Super fast, super strong and in my experience super reliable. The T5 offers excellent sequential read speeds, reaching around 505 megabytes per second, the fastest I've seen in a portable SSD. However, it lags behind the T3 in sequential write performance, typically hitting around 300 to 325 megabytes per second for longer periods after a brief spike in the mid-400s. I found the T3 to perform slightly better over long periods of sequential writes compared to this drive. UPDATE: I've found that the 500GB version handles long sequential writes better than the 250GB model. If you plan on recording video, I recommend 500 instead of 250. I'll do a second review of 500 megabytes per second when recording shortly). Why is he losing a star? Mac software. The Mac software installs a memory resident "monitor" application that runs constantly in the background and is very difficult for the end user to uninstall. To uninstall the software, go to a terminal window and run a bash script. This is far from consumer-friendly and very bad for Samsung. The software is not required to use the drive and I strongly recommend not installing it.