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.

Comments

no

[TheGratefulNet]

regular ssd, usb3 interface, UASP (scsi over usb, new standard) and you have all the speed of native sata (that the drives can put out) and are still vendor neutral.

I try to avoid samsung products these days. after the fiasco with the evo drives, I'll look for another vendor.

and then there is always the worry that samsung will insert commercials between disk block seeks (inside joke, sorry if that does not make immediate sense to you).

Re:no

[ihtoit]

I'm more concerned with Samsung uploading an incremental mirror of your hard drive to its cloud.

(ditto inside joke thing).

Re:no

[ihtoit]

even further back. I have three Adaptec SCSI-to-USB adapters - actually physical pin-compatibility adapters. I've had those since probably 2005 or even before. They'll mount on pretty much anything I plug them into, from Windows ME through 7, OSX from Tiger/PPC (the one I've tried it on), and several flavours of Linux from around Knoppix 5.1.1 and I can still read every hard drive I still own from a 10MB 40-pin Winchester through the pile of 500GB Deskstars, several Seagate 9.1GB UW ans a good few 50-pin random and various capacity drives - not forgetting of course, the takep drives, slot loading and cassette DVD/R/RW/RAM drives and my pride and joy of MO gear that still works: a custom cased LS120/Zip100 triple threat (it reads 3.5" floppies, too!). All USB mass storage is really just SCSI layer on the USB stack.

NSA Backdoor preinstalled?

[Anonymous Coward]

NSA Backdoor preinstalled?

Danger of SSDs

[bradgoodman]

for a ton of technical reasons I won't get into right now (remapping/wear leveling) SSDs aren't usually able to handle power faults like regular HDs. Too often, taking an unexpected power hit can easily result of massive amounts of lost data, or even loss of the device itself. I've seen this happen at least 20 times. Thete are allegedly some "enterprise grade SSDs" which may or may not mitigate this issue. I'm tired of seeing articles citing all kinds of performance tests that go into absolutely no detail on if you are going to lose all your data the next time you lose power, or have to force-off your laptop because it locked-up on you.

Re: Danger of SSDs

[dpidcoe]

I thought this was the reason a lot of SSDs now have a collection of capacitors to finish out the writes with in the event of a power loss?

Re:Danger of SSDs

[mlts]

I wonder if the latest generation of filesystems like ZFS, btrfs, and ReFS would be useful, so a corrupt file that wasn't completely written would be detected by the FS during a background scrub or garbage collection task. With RAID-Z, the corruption can be found. Z2, the corruption likely can be fixed.

Re: Danger of SSDs

[Bengie]

SSDs with "power loss protection" store enough power to write out all of their cache, which is something like 1GB now days. Like we've mentioned, we don't care about caches not being flushed, but how to the internal mapping tables hold up without "power loss protected". My hope would be that modern controllers can handle keeping internal state and just screw the data in cache.

I was reading about Samsung's "RAPID Mode" that uses system memory as a write cache to speed up writes to the SSD. One of the topics about "RAPID Mode", which is even more sensitive to power loss because of increase caching, is that it handles power loss "well". They have done extensive testing with "RAPID Mode" and power loss. I figure if they can offer 10 year warranties and feel confident about these issues, I'll trust them until proven otherwise. They have a great track record. I still wouldn't put all of my eggs in one basket.