AM) by Jasmit Singh ᠌

Name: Samsung X5 Portable SSD 1TB Thunderbolt 3 External SSD - Gray/Red (Model MU-PB1T0B/AM)
Item: Samsung X5 Portable SSD 1TB Thunderbolt 3 External SSD - Gray/Red (Model MU-PB1T0B/AM)
Rating: 3

November 15, 2022

Normal quality, you can use it.

I took a drive to replace the Samsung T5 with USB-C in the hope of greater speed. But if the T5 was impenetrably reliable, then the X5 (as I already wrote in the shortcomings) periodically falls off on my Macbook. I use the disk for a large catalog of photos in RAW, I work with them in Capture One. For such a task, the difference in speed between T5 and X5 is not noticeable, so I went back to T5 - it's more reliable.

Pros

- Excellent read / write speed, almost comparable to internal drives. There is nowhere higher for an external drive. - High-quality assembly and materials, beautiful packaging. It feels like a branded item, not a cheap noname. - I have no complaints about the heat. Of course, it gets hotter than a USB drive, but here the speeds are different. Do not cover the top of the device with a sweater or tablecloth, and it will not overheat.

Cons

- On the MacBook Pro 2022, the disk intermittently falls off with the message "The disk was not ejected correctly." Appears when the macbook is running on battery power. I don’t know whether the disk suddenly lacks power, or some kind of hardware and software incompatibility, but this behavior does not please. I tried to change the cables - it doesn’t help (of course, I use only Thunderbolt-3 cables, I didn’t confuse it with regular USB-C). ADDITION: as a result, I disassembled the disk and found a severed SMD capacitor inside. I don’t know when disassembling it came off or even earlier, but perhaps this explains the spontaneous shutdowns of the disk during operation, which I wrote about above. That is, not a design flaw of the model, but simply a defective copy. - Samsung's disk encryption software is unsatisfactory. Installs its own low-level kernel extensions in MacOS, the quality of which is questionable. In principle, you can easily do without it and encrypt the disk using MacOS itself, but, unfortunately, the disk firmware can only be ated through this software. - It is also worth considering that the device only works with Thunderbolt-3 connectors, it cannot be connected to a computer with USB-C.