Although we anticipated its launch last January, coverage derived from events like CES doesn't usually deliver all the data we want, so it's an excellent opportunity to review the virtues of the brand-new Samsung T1 portable SSD, which promises to rewrite several rules in terms of speed, a critical detail among those users who need to move hundreds of gigabytes in a very short time.
The question about which portable storage medium is most convenient for the user is demanding an answer with an ever-increasing level of complexity. The number of options on the market is gigantic; however, capacity and price have ceased to be the only parameters to consider. The volume of data per user grows day by day, and that implies not only having space to store it, but also doing so in a reasonable time. Fortunately, the combination of solid-state technology and advanced interfaces like USB 3.0 has allowed the development of very attractive products, and one of the most recent to debut is the Samsung T1. After its formal introduction during CES 2015, several high-profile portals already offer it online, and Amazon has it as "the best seller" among portable units.
If you don't have a USB 3.0 port on your computer, you shouldn't worry, since the Samsung T1 can work via USB 2.0 like any other pen drive or external disk. However, if you want to reach the impressive 450 megabytes per second reading that the unit offers, you'll need to find a way to incorporate one of the new ports into your system. When subjected to real tests, the T1's numbers are a bit more modest: 430 megabytes per second in sequential reading, and about 410 megabytes per second in writing. I insist: the final performance of the Samsung T1 will depend on your computer. The presence of USB 3.0 is very important, but the rest will be work of functions like the obscure "UASP mode", which has little support these days.
The Samsung T1 became the best-selling option within Amazon for a simple reason: the 250-gigabyte version costs $149. On this side of the Atlantic, the differences become scandalous, and the same unit jumps to an insulting €240 (taxes can burn in hell and stay there, thank you very much), although I've seen Italian portals selling it for a little over €160. Samsung offers with the T1 three years of warranty and 256-bit AES encryption, which makes its price a little less painful. If you can get it at a reasonable number, and your data volume demands such speed, you shouldn't hesitate to buy it.
