Samsung T5 Review: New portable USB SSD utilizing 3D / VNAND Flash Tech

Buy it on Amazon - (affiliate link) - Samsung's new portable SSD brings some new technology but similar performance to their prior (and excellent) T3 drive. See more portable SSDs: and subscribe!
VIDEO INDEX:
00:10 - Size comparison to T3
00:40 - Hardware overview
00:46 - Includes two cables
01:12 - Price
01:32 - Compatibility
01:38 - Do not install the included software
02:28 - Performance: Sequential Reads and Writes
03:41 - Performance: Random Reads and Writes (Crystal Diskmark)
04:31 - Two new features: 3D NAND & USB 3.1 Gen 2
05:33 - Performance: 4k multicamera video editing
06:22 - Conclusion and final thoughts
The 500GB version has more consistent sequential performance. See here:
See my T3 review here:
The T5 is one of the first consumer products with a new 3D NAND technology where the chip is constructed vertically to allow for more storage density in small form factors. It also has a faster USB interface versus the prior edition drive.
What does this mean for the average user? Not much. The reality of this drive is that it performs close to where last year's drive performed. That's not a bad thing given how well the T3 performed for a portable SSD drive. Super fast, super rugged, and in my experience super reliable too.
The T5 excels in its sequential read speeds, achieving the fastest I've seen out of a portable SSD at around 505 megabytes per second. It falls behind the T3 in its sequential write performance, however, typically getting around 300-325 megabytes per second sustained over long periods of time after a short burst in the mid 400's. I found the T3 to do a little better over a long period of sequential writes vs. this drive.
Random reads and writes are consistent with the prior model (about 25 megs/sec in reads and 36 megs/sec in writes).
The software on the Mac is my only real gripe here. The Mac software installs a memory resident "monitor" app that runs in the background all the time and is very difficult for an end-user to uninstall. Removing the software requires going into the terminal window and running a bash script. This is far from consumer friendly and very poor on Samsung's part to do this. Software is not required to use the drive and I strongly suggest not installing it.
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