Samsung Portable SSD T5 500GB and 2TB Performance Review

Samsung Portable SSD T5 Performance Benchmarks

CrystalDiskInfo is free benchmark that many people use to test storage drives with, but this test runs really quick and the results show the highest score of the five ‘burst’ tests for each performance metric tested. The problem is that the tests are so small and quick it rarely ever fills up a drives cache and is not a good look at real world performance on many external drives or SSDs that use TLC NAND Flash memory. We are including results for you to look at as you can use it at home to compare with to get an idea what the best case performance looks like on this drive.

Samsung T5 Portable SSD – 500GB CrystalDiskMark:

Samsung T5 Portable SSD – 2TB CrystalDiskMark:

When it comes to sequential read/write performance we topped out at 486/481 MB/s on the 500GB model and 481/480MB/s on the 2TB model. The scores improved to over 540 MB/s read and 510 MB/s write on both drives when a queue depth of 32 was tested! These scores are comparable to an internal SATA III SSD, so these are some wicked fast sequential file transfer speeds. The Samsung Portable SSD T5 series uses USB 3.1 Gen 2 with UASP to reach these high data transfer speeds and if you use this drive on an older port you will get lower transfer speeds as a result. This is a best case scenario as we are testing on a desktop PC that has USB 3.1 Gen 2 ports!

The above chart from Samsung shows the performance one can expect from the Samsung Portable SSD T5 series and when we spot checked those numbers they appeared to be accurate. If your Samsung Portable SSD T5 drive is running slow it might just be due to the USB port that you are using, so keep an eye on that.

Samsung T5 Portable SSD – 500GB ATTO:

Samsung T5 Portable SSD – 2TB ATTO:

ATTO Disk Benchmark showed that we were getting up to 561 MB/s read and 534 MB/s write speeds on the 500GB Samsung Portable SSD T5 and then 556 MB/s read and 532 MB/s write on the larger 2TB model!

Samsung T5 Portable SSD – 500GB Anvil:

Samsung T5 Portable SSD – 2TB Anvil:

With the 100% incompressible preset in Anvil’s Storage Utilities we found sequential speeds of up to 504 MB/s read and then just over 480 MB/s write. The overall score of each drive was around 3,560 points.

We wanted to do some real world file transfers, so we copied over few MKV Full-HD movie that added up to almost 6GB. During the transfer we found that we were getting around 360 MB/s on average when the data was being written to both of the Samsung Portable SSD T5 series drives. It took just over 17 seconds to transfer the files over and is the fastest solution that we have testing that isn’t using a RAID array. The Samsung SSD T3 2TB drive from took nearly 20 seconds to complete the same exact file transfer, so we are seeing nearly a 20% performance improvement on the T5’s ever so important write speeds!

Let’s wrap this up!