Samsung Portable SSD T5 Review: 64-Layer V-NAND Debuts in Retail

​Synthetic Benchmarks

Various synthetic benchmarks are available to quickly evaluate the performance of direct-attached storage devices. Real-world performance testing often has to be a customized test. We present both varieties in this review, starting with the synthetic benchmarks in this section. Prior to covering those, we have a quick look at our testbed setup and testing methodology.

Testbed Setup and Testing Methodology

Evaluation of DAS units on Windows is done with the testbed outlined in the table below. For devices with a USB 3.1 Gen 2 (via a Type-C interface) connections (such as the Samsung Portable SSD T5 that we are considering today), we utilize the USB 3.1 Type-C port enabled by the Intel Alpine Ridge controller. It connects to the Z170 PCH via a PCIe 3.0 x4 link.

The full details of the reasoning behind choosing the above build components can be found here. The list of DAS units used for comparison purposes is provided below.

• Samsung Portable SSD T5 2TB
• Samsung Portable SSD T5 500GB
• ADATA SD700 512GB
• Corsair Voyager GS 512GB
• G-DRIVE slim SSD USB-C 500GB
• Samsung Portable SSD T3 2TB
• SanDisk Extreme 900 1.92TB

ATTO and Crystal DiskMark

Samsung claims speeds of up to 540 MBps, and it is backed up by the ATTO benchmarks provided below. Unfortunately, these access traces are not very common in real-life scenarios.

Samsung Portable SSD T5 2TBSamsung Portable SSD T5 500GBCorsair Voyager GS 512GBSamsung Portable SSD T3 2TBSanDisk Extreme 900 1.92TB

CrystalDiskMark, despite being a canned benchmark, provides a better estimate of the performance range with a selected set of numbers. As evident from the screenshot below, the performance can dip to as low as 24 MBps for 4K random read accesses. The 3x - 6x increase in performance at higher queue depths for these random accesses shows that UASP is active and working well.

Samsung Portable SSD T5 2TBSamsung Portable SSD T5 500GBADATA SD700 512GBCorsair Voyager GS 512GBG-DRIVE slim SSD USB-C 500GBSamsung Portable SSD T3 2TBSanDisk Extreme 900 1.92TB