The SSD Review The Worlds Dedicated SSD Education and Review Resource |
USB4 has been out for some time now and, to say the least, it has been a breath of fresh air to storage enthusiasts and media professionals worldwide. Newest on that USB4 storage block is the Samsung P9 USB4 Portable SSD which is capable of 4GB/s read and 3.8GB/s write speeds. What’s is an even more important metric is that Samsung has put the effort into this storage device and ensured that it contains great sustained write speeds.
After all, transferring media means nothing if our intial speedy data transfer speed drops to anything less that 1GB/s in today’s media world. Better yet, we have the Samsung P9 on our test bench and will be demonstrating these speeds first hand in this report! The P9 doubles that speed with an incredible 2GB/s sustained write performance.
The Samsung P9 is brand spanking new to the storage space. We are very fortunate to have one of the first in hand for review, and in fact, Samsung’s P9/P7 Launch Event was only three weeks ago. Check it out here:
The Samsung P9 is a USB4 Gen3 x4 portable SSD and is available in capacities of 1, 2, 4 and 8TB. Samsung claims the 8TB is the industry’s first of its kind with these speeds and this capacity. Listed performance is 4GB/s read and 3.8GB/s write and Samsung speaks to sustained write performance of 2GB/s in their preliminary literature.
The Samsung P9 comes with the P9 itself and a USB4 rated cable. This cable is rather important as it is a USB 4 cable rated at 40Gbps and, anything with a lesser rating, will not be able to attain full performance. Speaking of which, this portable SSD is backward compatible but, in order to attain top performance, your PC or laptop must have a USB Type-C port capable of performance up to 40Gbps. This will be listed somewhere in your system literature.
The Samsung P9 is constructed of a flat black metal alloy with a LED top left of the front, and also has a thin rubber base which makes it convenient for desk placement. It is rather thin, measuring 90x65x8.3mm and weighing only 96 grams. MSRP for the P9 is listed at $339.99 (1TB), $649.99 (2TB), $1349.99 (4TB) and $2289.99 (8TB) but CHECK AMAZON for availability and more accurate street pricing.
Surprisingly, there is no IP-rating for the P9 but it does speak to advanced thermal protection and this SSD does have AES 256-bit hardware encryption. In fact, this hardware encryption gets put to use right off if you choose to run Samsung Magician and secure this portable SSD by setting a 4-16 character password.
Samsung Magician is absolutely free and one of the best SSD maintenance software packages we have seen to date. Not only does it allow you to activate the SSDs security mode, but also, one can secure erase the SSD, validate that it is Samsung Authenticated, change partition sizes, as well as confirm the performance as we have done here:
Let’s jump to the next page and validate the Samsung P9 portable SSD performance…