Samsung T3 External SSD 1TB

A massively portable external SSD, but costly

$370 Manufacturer Samsung, samsung.com

Requirements OS X 10.7 or higher Weight 1.8 oz Features USB-C port, USB-C to USB-A cable, AES 256-bit hardware encryption

The T3’s metal enclosure feels more suitably premium than the plastic body of its predecessor, the T1, though there’s no major practical difference between them – they’re both simple and stylish external SSDs.

Capacities start at 250GB for only a little more than the T1 would have cost you before the new drive was announced, and the top capacity is now 2TB, which will cost you $748 – pretty much the same price as building a physically larger drive using a bare SSD and a less pretty enclosure. The difference between prices at lower capacities, including the 1TB model tested, falls accordingly.

The USB 3 solid-state drives we’ve tested lately all perform pretty similarly. Transfer rates on most peak around 430–440MB/s, so we were unsurprised that Samsung’s new portable SSD followed suit with 437.4MB/s large transfers. Its overall performance was also what we expected for a USB-C-based drive. So it’s fast, but so are other equivalent drives.

The drive offers encryption at the hardware level. With this applied, you initially see a volume that contains a tool for password entry to unlock your files. Doing so caused the first volume to be ejected in such a way that OS X alerted us about premature ejection. If you’ll only use the T3 with Macs, you could use OS X’s equivalent (but software-based) encryption to avoid this minor annoyance, but it’s not really a big deal.

the bottom line. The T3 is tiny and light, but you can save a bit of money if design doesn’t matter. Alan Stonebridge