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United Kingdom, Belfast
1 Level
709 Review
47 Karma

Review on Samsung X5 Portable SSD 1TB Thunderbolt 3 External SSD - Gray/Red (Model MU-PB1T0B/AM) by Chris Nastanovich

Revainrating 2 out of 5

Fast drive but met your pre-purchase expectations

I recently bought a Samsung T5 - 1TB model and it's not a bad drive by any means but I've read reviews on the Samsung X5 and wanted to know if it would is as fast as people say. The X5 comes in a nice compact box and as you can see it's barely bigger than the T5 and easily fits in my hand. I didn't use synthetic benchmarking to test the speed of this drive because I don't think it reflects real-world performance. The laptop used has the following specifications: Laptop: Dell XPS 13 9370 (2018 model) RAM: 16 GB, 2133 MHz LPDDR3 Storage: 512 GB M.2 2280 SSD, PCIe NVME Operating system: Windows 10 Home. I connected both drives and transferred 357GB of data (i.e. movies, TV shows, etc.) from T5 to X5. As you can see from my photos it took about 20 minutes to copy everything. The X5 didn't come close to the promised 2800 write speed, but I can definitely say that it's much faster than my T5 and my old hard drive. Out of curiosity, I copied the 5GB Planet of the Apes file onto myself, and it literally took 5 seconds. CRAZINESS! I want to say that the reading speed is not impressive. Copying (reading) the same file to my desktop with X5 strangely got me only 9MB and sometimes more than 100MB. Another thing to note is that the X5 will get warm with prolonged use. Research shows that if the drive overheats, it will slow itself down, which might explain why the speed drops so often, but all drives get hot, so don't let that stop me from buying one. Updated 06/12/2019. I am returning this SSD because of poor performance. I've had both 1TB and 2TB models and in my experience this drive didn't even come close to the speeds it promised. My first issue is that the read/write speeds were extremely inconsistent. From 1.5GB to 400MB, 400MB on average. This is unacceptable as I have a Samsung T5 and it has performed best in almost every test I have run. I cannot recommend this to any consumer.

Pros
  • New
Cons
  • Slightly torn