Samsung X5 Thunderbolt 3 Portable SSD Review (1TB)

REAL WORLD FILE TRANSFER COMPARISON

For our Real World File Transfer Comparison, we have included the OWC Thunderblade V4 TB3 RAID0 Chassis, Mercury Helios 3 PCIe TB3 Chassis, Netstor NA611TB3,  TEKq Rapide 512GB TB3,  Glyph USB 3.1 2TB Atom RAID external SSD, and  Samsung T3 in our testing with the Samsung X5 TB3 1TB Portable SSD.  This test is conducted through the transfer of data from one spot on the test drive to another to give us the truest of transfer speed results for that device.

Considering the Samsung X5 is based on the Samsung 970 EVO, it fared very well, just behind the G-Tech G Drive that we reviewed yesterday, that drive containing the SanDisk Extreme Pro NVMe M.2 SSD.  Still, the only three truly portable TB3 drives in this chart are the X5, G Drive and Tekq Rapide.  We’de be very curious to know how the Rapide did so well moving OS files as well.

AJA VIDEO SYSTEM DISK TEST

The AJA Video Systems Disk Test is relatively new to our testing and tests the transfer speed of video files with different resolutions and Codec.

PCMARK VANTAGE X64 HDD SUITE

The SSD Review uses benchmark software called PCMark Vantage x64 HDD Suite to create testing scenarios that might be used in the typical user experience. There are eight tests in all and the tests performed record the speed of data movement in MB/s to which they are then given a numerical score after all of the tests are complete. The simulations are as follows:

• Windows Defender In Use
• Streaming Data from storage in games such as Alan Wake which allows for massive worlds and riveting non-stop action
• Importing digital photos into Windows Photo Gallery
• Starting the Vista Operating System
• Home Video editing with Movie Maker which can be very time consuming
• Media Center which can handle video recording, time shifting and streaming from Windows media center to an extender such as Xbox
• Cataloging a music library
• Starting applications

PCMARK VANTAGE RESULTS

We are going to totally discount PCMark Vantage results as there is simply no way these results could be in any way possible.  We have left it in the report simply for transparency.