Buy it on Amazon - lon.tv/5s264 (affiliate link) - Samsung's super fast X5 portable Thunderbolt 3 SSD delivers performance but there is a catch that might turn off the power users it's hoping to attract. See more portable SSDs: lon.tv/usbssd and subscribe! lon.tv/s
See the detailed Anandtech review here:
lon.tv/x5review
VIDEO INDEX:
0:00 - Intro
01:06 - Pricing and overall build quality
01:29 - Price comparison to USB-C T5 Drive
01:47 - Thermal throttling discussion
02:07 - Not compatible with prior thunderbolt versions
02:51 - Internals
03:19 - Blackmagic Disk Speed Test
03:44 - Thermal throttling
04:45 - CrystalDiskMark
05:32 - Performance comparison to the Samsung T5
06:11 - Thunderbolt 3 only
06:35 - Encryption software
07:27 - Final thoughts
First things first: This drive REQUIRES Thunderbolt 3. If your computer has a USB-C connector it needs to also have Thunderbolt technology built in. No Thunderbolt, no connectivity. Period. Additionally if you have an older Thunderbolt 2 or 1 equipped device it won't work with those computers either even with an adapter. I tried using it through a Thunderbolt 2 hub and that failed too. So compatibility is going to be very limited here.
Now provided you have a properly equipped Thunderbolt 3 computer you will see some serious performance out of this drive. On my 2016 Macbook Pro write speeds were at 1.7 gigabytes per second and 2.2 gigabytes per second on reads. That's the fastest external single drive I've ever tested. Remarkable. I had even faster write speeds on my Windows PC.
BUT - this drive gets hot when it's pushing data that fast. And when it does the drive will throttle itself, delivering lower write performance to prevent overheating. It doesn't take much to set it off either, so if you're capturing high bandwidth video or copying super large files you'll notice a slowdown on writes. I saw it happen running one of my benchmarks and popular tech site Anandtech found that it can sometimes drop to as little as 60 megabytes per second when writing over extended periods of time
If Samsung made a more utilitarian case with better thermal performance it likely would perform better. Unfortunately the target market for this drive are people who regularly tax their hardware and they will not be pleased with its inconsistent write performance under heavy load. But if you're not doing heavy writes you'll be pleased with what this drive can deliver.
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14 авг 2024
