Samsung Portable SSD T3 2TB Review

By Nathan Kirsch

Real World Benchmark Results and ATTO Disk Benchmark

The Samsung Portable SSD T3 can reach up to 450MB/s read and write when used on a proper USB 3.0 or USB 3.1 port with UASP (USB Attached SCSI Protocol) enabled. If you run it on a normal USB 3.1 Gen.1 or USB 3.0 port you’ll be limited to 350MB/s and when used on USB 2.0 you’ll top out at no more than 49 MB/s. The performance you get also depends on what OS that you are using.

Samsung Performance Chart

The chart above shows Samsung’s internal Portable SSD T3 performance numbers on Windows 7, Windows 8.1, and Windows 10 as well USB 2.0, USB 3.1 Gen1 and USB 3.1 Gen1 with UASP. We performed all of our own testing on Windows 8.1 with a USB 3.1 port with UASP enabled.

The first test we performed on the Samsung Portable SSD T3 was to move a 4.0GB 1080P movie from the Videos folder on PC running Windows 8.1 to the T3 2TB drive and then back again using the built-in Windows 8.1 Explorer file moving utility.

move-from

move-to

We were shocked to see that our speeds were in the 400-405 MB/s range during the file transfer and it took just under 10 seconds to move a full length 1080P film! If you are transferring 1-2TB of data at once the drive does get hot and that could slow performance down. Samsung Dynamic Thermal Guard Protection automatically monitors and maintains optimal operating temperatures to reduce the risk of overheating. It’s winter when we did our testing and we moved around 25GB of data around at times and didn’t see any performance drops.

ATTO v3.05

ATTO is one of the oldest drive benchmarks still being used today and is still very relevant in the SSD world. ATTO measures transfers across a specific volume length. It measures raw transfer rates for both reads and writes and places the data into graphs that can be very easily interpreted. The test was run with the default runs of 0.5KB through 64MB transfer sizes with the total length being 256MB.

Samsung Portable SSD T3 2TB on USB 3.1:

Samsung Portable SSD T3 ATTO Benchmark

Benchmark Results: ATTO showed Samsung Portable SSD T1 250GB drive maxing out at 448 MB/s read and 434MB/s write in the standard overlapped I/O benchmark when connected to the ASUS X99 Saberthooth motherboard with the USB 3.1 interface. This drive is rated at having up to 450MB/s sequential read and write speeds, so we are happy with our test results.