Samsung T5 EVO

The reason this exists is capacity in a shape that runs off the port. Getting the same amount of storage any other way on this page means several drives or a desktop unit with its own power brick, and neither travels. Everything else about the drive is a consequence of that decision, including the interface, which is a generation behind the rest of the category.

Being slow turns out to have one genuine advantage. A drive that tops out where this one does cannot saturate a 5 Gbps link, so an ageing USB-A laptop, a television, or a console costs you nothing at all here. Plugged into an expensive modern port it performs exactly the same. That is a rare thing to be able to say, and it makes this the least fussy drive in the comparison about what it gets connected to.

Long writes are where the compromise shows. Reviewer coverage at launch found sequential writes falling sharply once the fast cache fills, down into territory a spinning disk would recognise, and filling a drive this large is a job measured in hours regardless. Load it in the evening. It is a library drive, not a working drive, and expecting a timeline to play back off it is the mistake to avoid.

The flip side of that is a durability argument the specification table hides. A controller running at this ceiling never generates the heat that pushes faster drives into thermal throttling, so the failure that ends a card dump halfway through in a warm car does not apply here. Samsung also publishes a two-metre drop rating, which several drives in this comparison do not claim at all. Slow is not the same as fragile, and here it is close to the opposite.

Set against that, easy to connect is not the same as easy to live with. A full load is an evening rather than a coffee break, the write speed collapses partway through any large copy, and the console caveat below catches people out. Nothing about it is difficult; a good deal about it is slow.

Console owners should know the specific limitation, because the listings do not spell it out. A drive like this can store PlayStation 5 games and play PlayStation 4 titles directly, but current-generation games have to be moved back to internal storage before they will run. For a large library that shuffling is still far quicker than downloading again, which is the actual use case.

The rubber skin and the moulded hook are a better design than they look. The hook takes a carabiner or a bag loop, and after a few weeks it changes how the drive gets carried. The shell picks up lint the way every rubberised drive does. Samsung’s software handles the hardware encryption setup and, as with the rest of the portable line, firmware updates on Linux take more effort than most owners will bother with.