An SSD is one of the best upgrades you can make to a computer, and will offer noticeable speed improvements even on older machines. They"ve also come down in price over the years, with value drives such as the Crucial MX 100 sitting at around 41 cents per GB as of January 2015.
SSDs are rugged and can be built on very small boards, making them suitable for portable storage, but so far we"ve only seen third party solutions, which are not ideal, and also carry high price tags. With the introduction of the T1 external SSD at CES 2015, Samsung is the first NAND manufacturer to enter the portable SSD market.
The Samsung T1 is built for speed and security using the company"s proprietary V-NAND technology, but also features a stylish and compact enclosure, with laser patterning and a black chrome finish.The drive works with both Windows and Mac PCs by utilizing the exFAT file system, is USB 3.0 UASP-enabled and supports AES 256-bit hardware encryption.
The portable SSD drive comes in capacities of 250GB, 500GB, and 1TB with a starting price of $179.99, and is covered by a three year warranty. Samsung claims sequential speeds of up to 450MB/s,and random reads and writes are rated for up to 8,000/21,000 IOPS.
This sounds very good on paper, but your mileage may vary in real life, especially when transferring multiple small files. Still, the drive is a very welcome addition to the portable SSD market, and comes from Samsung, which is one of the big boys of this developing field.