Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Samsung's Portable SSD T1 Tested

Posted by samzenpus on from the where-the-rubber-hits-the-road dept.

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.

8 of 105 comments (clear)

  1. no by TheGratefulNet · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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).

    --

    --
    "It is now safe to switch off your computer."
    1. Re:no by Bengie · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Intel has a bug that makes you lose all of your data, oops. Samsung has a bug that reduces the speed of your drive, then they offer a fix, OMG BURN THEM!

    2. Re:no by sexconker · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

    3. Re:no by ihtoit · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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.

      --
      Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
  2. NSA Backdoor preinstalled? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    NSA Backdoor preinstalled?

  3. Re: Danger of SSDs by Bengie · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  4. Re:Danger of SSDs by Curtman · · Score: 4, Funny

    Intel 5400 RPM enterprise SSDs are the industry leader. I've never had issues with the ones I have.

    I keep mine on a 33 1/3 RPM turntable. Less centrifugal force. Damn cables keep getting tangled though.

    WTF?

  5. Re:Danger of SSDs by jtownatpunk.net · · Score: 4, Funny

    I overclock mine to 78 RPM.