Performance, Pricing and Conclusion

Performance:

We did some performance testing of the mSATA unit connected directly to our storage testbed. This testing verified performance nearly identical to that of a retail 850 EVO. This means the T1's ultimate performance is going to boil down to the efficiency of the ASMedia bridge chip chosen for this device. Lets see how it does:

Read:

Write:

Here's an ATTO run to get a feel for how the T1 handles random performance:

Finally, for those on Mac, here is a Blackmagic run:

Overall the T1 turned in the fastest USB 3.0 throughput seen in a portable SSD to date. The ASMedia bridge is proving to do very well considering all of the overhead involved in bridging a SATA SSD to a USB system over a SCSI protocol.

Pricing and Warranty:

The Portable SSD T1 ships with a 3 year warranty.

Conclusion:

Pros:

  • The fastest USB 3.0 device we have tested to date
  • Extremely good performance even with the Microsoft InBox driver (Windows 8.1)
  • Small, light, durable housing
  • Small and thin USB 3.0 cable included
  • AES-256 encryption saw no impact on performance and was easy to enable and use

Cons:

  • Sequential throughput may be limited by other bottlenecks in older systems
  • Getting full throughput may require using an Intel USB port and driver
  • Housing gets warm/hot during heavy continuous use
  • USB 3.0 may soon be dated in favor of USB 3.1c

The Samsung Portable SSD T1 turned out to be the fastest USB 3.0 device tested to date. The built in AES-256 encryption protects the entire drive and can be easily password protected, though a small software app must be installed to unlock the secure volume when connected. The VNAND equipped controller performs very well even when held back by the USB 3.0 link, which is more of a bottleneck when compared to SATA. Still, the T1 employs UASP and performed at high queue depths in our testing, easily reaching the 460 MB/sec maximum throughput of USB 3.0. With a portable SSD this fast, don't be surprised to find yourself limited by other parts of your system that might be too slow to keep up with it!

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