Product Review: Samsung Portable SSD T1

Recently, I happened to be at Sydney’s ever-iconic Opera House at the same time The Ginger Prince, that young scallywag Harry, visited. I mention this only because his royal lordship wasn’t the most impressive thing I witnessed there. Nope, while Harry was pressing the flesh with gushing fans outside, I was attending the launch of Samsung’s Portable SSD T1. If that sounds boring (it kinda does), then it really wasn’t. Why? Well, it’s Samsung’s first portable SSD and, shut the front door, it’s fast.

With AES 256 bit encryption and read/write speeds up to 450MB/s, you’d expect this bad-boy to be a hefty piece of kit, right? Wrong. It’s not much bigger than a credit card, stylishly designed, ludicrously light (30 grams) and, unlike traditional external HDDs, it has no moving parts so is completely silent.

I watched a live demonstration. They transferred over 100GB of movies (I believe it was over 50 individual files) in five minutes and ten seconds. Five minutes. 100GB. That is seriously impressive. I watched it work with CDJs, with Macs and with PCs. It seems ideal if you are a creative soul that needs to quickly transfer files securely onto something portable. And, it looks sick (it’s won a bunch of international design awards already).

Anyway, I don’t often gush about products. I’m not much of a consumer. But this little piece of gear really impressed me and kinda feels like the future.

Available in 250GB, 500GB and 1TB storage capacities, the T1 is now available to purchase at select retailers from RRP $269.00. For more info, head over to the Samsung website.

Review by Bobby Townsend.