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Samsung's Portable SSD T1 Tested
MojoKid writes The bulk of today's high-capacity external storage devices still rely on mechanical hard disk drives with spinning media and other delicate parts. Solid state drives are much faster and less susceptible to damage from vibration, of course. That being the case, Samsung saw an opportunity to capitalize on a market segment that hasn't seen enough development it seems--external SSDs. There are already external storage devices that use full-sized SSDs, but Samsung's new Portable SSD T1 is more akin to a thumb drive, only a little wider and typically much faster. Utilizing Samsung's 3D Vertical NAND (V-NAND) technology and a SuperSpeed USB 3.0 interface, the Portable SSD T1 redlines at up to 450MB/s when reading or writing data sequentially, claims Samsung. For random read and write activities, Samsung rates the drive at up to 8,000 IOPS and 21,000 IOPS, respectively. Pricing is more in-line with high-performance standalone SSDs, with this 1TB model reviewed here arriving at about $579. In testing, the drive did live up to its performance and bandwidth claims as well.
SCSI over USB only really adds queuing, improving speed when many small reads/writes are performed, and you'd need an SSD supporting SCSI and an enclosure/adapter supporting SCSI over USB. Further, for large transfers plain USB 3 is just as fast, while having the benefit of being cheaper, and more readily available and compatible than SCSI over USB. Of course, straight SATA III (via eSATA if you want) is still faster.
USB 3 gets you 5 Gbps and has to be handled by the CPU.
SATA III gets you 6 Gbps without going through the CPU.
USB 3.1 promises to get you 10 Gbps (and lower overhead), but still has to go through the CPU.
And Thunderbolt is just a convoluted and expensive way of piping a limited number of PCIe lanes to a random physical port and requiring the user to buy an expensive cable. 10 Gbps or 20 Gbps. 40 Gbps in the next revision.
SATA Express / M.2 can get you 32 Gbps using 4 PCIe 3.0 lanes or 2 PCIe 4.0 lanes wrapped up in NVMe.
And you can always just throw more PCIe lanes at some controller (on-board or an via a PCIe slot) or some device directly if you want more bandwidth.
USB 3 will be the standard for external shit for a long time. The C connector and USB 3.1 are going to have a hell of a time gaining traction.
For people who want performance, SATA Express / M.2 using NVMe or other direct PCIe solutions win.
https://www.reddit.com/r/news/comments/2w4ihb/kaspersky_labs_has_uncovered_a_malware_publisher/