Samsung T5 Portable SSD review: personal storage in its purest form

The Pitch

Personal data storage has always been a really interesting category because, while everyone needs storage, there's still a lot of potential customers would rather pass on the category wholesale than deal with some of the caveats and hassle it sometimes entails. Where enterprise will usually err towards security when it comes to data storage, consumers will all too often favor convenience. 

Another bulky piece of tech to carry around? Pass.

When it feels like takes almost as long to back your data up on the cloud, why bother?

It is in firm opposition to these pain-points that Samsung have always positioned their T-series of portable solid state hard drives. Since their inception, they’ve been making storage look and feel sexy. They did it with the T1 in 2015 and with the T3 in 2016. Now, they’re building on that legacy again.

Third time's the charm - and the T5 is a thing of beauty.

Specs

The Samsung T5 is a portable SSD with a single USB-C port. It boasts a maximum transfer speed of up to 540 MB/sec and comes bundled with a USB-C to USB 3.0 cable, a USB-C to USB-C cable and a three year warranty.

Credit: Samsung

The Alluring Blue version of the hard drive is available in 250GB and 500GB sizes while the Deep Black model offers more heavy-duty options with 1TB and 2TB.

Design

There’s not a huge amount to be said about the physical form-factor of the Samsung T5 Portable SSD. Devilishly light, there’s not much else to it. Samsung have again gone for the less-is-more approach here.

It’s a small metal square with rounded edges and a single USB Type-C port on one end. Sized just 10.5 mm in thickness, the T5 weighs just 51 grams in total. Samsung say the SSD is shock and drop resistant for up to two meters - and we believe them. In addition, after a month of carrying it around in a bag full of keys, cables and other devices, the T5 also proved surprisingly resilient against scratching.

Credit: Samsung

The last element of the design worth touching on here is the added security software app that Samsung have bundled in with the T5. It’s not super complicated to use (and more-or-less identical to the software bundled with the T3) but it does allow you to easily set up some added security on the T5 via AES 256-bit encryption.

Compared to the previous T3, the T5 holds up as a smart - albeit minimal - refinement that sticks with what works whilst also boosting the maximum transfer speed and adding support for 2nd gen USB 3.1 transfers (10gps vs 5gps).